It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work.

As lovers of truth, we want to be close to it. Sometimes - evil thought, evil temptation - we want to be close to it by misleading others about its presence.

I'm pretty sure my dog, Pip, gets lonely when there is no one to be with him. But we humans can end up with a gnawing worry about that separation possibly becoming a permanent condition.

Of course, each of us has to write our own book, live our own life.

I worry that we don't currently have a democracy in the United States. Instead we have what [political philosopher] Sheldon Wolin has recently labeled a sort of inverted totalitarianism.

I look back on some of my early reviews of others, and realize to my chagrin that I've been as guilty as anybody else on that front.

None of us is perfect, but the point of our writing is to try to become better, to learn something that we may not have already realized, about ourselves, about the world we inhabit.

We can never leave loneliness behind completely - it is part of what forms us.

At some point just about all of us experience loneliness. In a sense, it is what it means to be a sentient animal, to have an experience of separation from others.

Seize the day and explore the allure of life.

I didn’t argue. Anybody who that drove a Hummer and carried a Glock, let alone had the audacity to wear white after Labor Day, wasn’t to be trifled with.

All husbands are alike but they have different faces so you can tell them apart.

Every time you say no to Jesus Christ, it makes it that much harder for you to say yes to Jesus Christ.

The two kinds of people on earth are the people who lift and the people who lean.

You cannot advocate decency and ethics, you must design the conditions that eliminate the problems. In scarcity, people will tend to steal. If you make things available, people tend not to steal.

Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.

Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.

Success comes to those that dare to dream dreams and are foolish enough to try and make them come true.

Whatever happens in Mogadishu, in Somalia, will happen in Great Britain. We have interlocking interests.