Let language be the divining rod that finds the sources of thought.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

We hunger for connection but take pride in being distant.

That word, confidence, was like butter on a hot stove for Darien, what he considered the most attractive quality in a woman.

Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.

Do I consider myself sexy? It all depends on the way I'm feeling. When I'm happy inside, that's when I feel most sexy.

You're a sword not a palm tree

One problem with how we think about the Bible is that people tend to jam it into narrower categories, when in fact it is many things all at once.

My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother taught high school English.

There is no escaping, at times, the gloomy suspicion that fiddling with pens and ink is, after all, no fit employment for a grown man.

I guess a lot of times pressure is put on something after it becomes big.

Books gave us a way to shape ourselves - to form our thoughts and to signal to each other who we were and who we wanted to be. They were part of our self-fashioning, no less than our clothes.