Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.

In moments when I am fully connected to my heart

All my humor is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing in the bread line - right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

There is value in being free and spontaneous but the greatest power comes from seeing and using what results from that freedom.

Remember, Voyager was just a flyby, Cassini is in orbit. We have the opportunity for monitoring them and their behavior, their comings and goings, how they evolve, when they appear and disappear.

Hillary Clinton continues to say Donald Trump's unacceptable, he doesn't have the character to be president. He is saying - continues saying she needs to be in prison.

Even if I know that really it's not a great song, even if it's a naff song but I have a good memory of it, then to me that's a great song.

Hope and despair ignore one another's cries.

If we do not believe in ourselves- neither in our efficacy nor in our goodness- the universe is a frightening place.

I was so shy. Instead of waiting in line with other kids at lunch, I'd go to a corner and buy a pretzel and orange juice. I think I had that for lunch the first three years of high school.

Who so taketh in hand to frame any state or government ought to presuppose that all men are evil, and at occasions will show themselves so to be.