Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.

I know I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

To knock today's prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday's prestige dialects.

We live in such a special time when literally anything we can think of is possible.

It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.

Against Steve Johnson at the Olympics I was down a couple of times.

Humility is the mother of giants.

Most programming languages are decidedly inferior to mathematical notation and are little used as tools of thought in ways that would be considered significant by, say, an applied mathematician.

I smile and think; This is my job, this is what I do for a living, and its what I’ve always wanted

And what do you say of lovers of wine... they are glad of any pretext of drinking any wine

Above the clouds the sky is always blue.

There is a kind of laughter people laugh at public events, as if a joke were a charity auction and they want to be seen to be bidding.