It was possible at last to hear the silence to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.

We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

[Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those and those even less so.

When you're going broke, it's best to have a great time.

Evolution by natural selection is not an idle hypothesis. The genetic variation on which selection acts is well understood in principle all the way down to the molecular level.

Tutoring a four year old to get into an exclusive preschool made as much sense as hiring a swim coach for a guppy.

The more I want a book to be done, the faster I type because I just want to get it out.

When you see something, you are supposed to tell the energy what year it is and that they don't belong there.

I would like to work with Pat [ Leonard] in any capacity. I would love to hear his versions.

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor

Residuals from Australia, from the Mission Magic show, saved my butt. So there is a reason for everything.

The most genuine and efficacious charity is that which greases the paws of the priests; such charity covers a multitude of sins.