My high-school papers, my college-application essays, read like Norman Mailer packed in a crunchy-peanut-butter sandwich.

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.

At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.

With 'Black Swan,' the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.

Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.

It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.

A lost election can have the jolt of a drop through the gallows door, leading to a dark night of the soul in which the future presses down like a cloud that will never lift.

Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.

Intelligence could be more briliant within modesty.

I couldn't make it in a chicken world, sir, so I hit the road in search of something better.

I believe that if life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade... And try to find somebody whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.

Blacks have a special history, since they were enslaved and were here as early as the first Americans. I hate to sound like a liberal but these are facts. That makes blacks a special group.

It's very difficult to judge yourself. Extreme self-doubt is only attractive when it's fictionalized. Which is why people love the movies. They are so reassuring.

I got to stick with what I know [about The Clinton Foundation]. I'm not an official of the State Department.

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

Devotion to you, O Blessed Virgin, is a means of salvation which God gives to those whom he wishes to save.

I have one piece of music, since 1997, and I don't see it having lyrics. Where does it go in this world? So I haven't recorded it.

There is no human being on earth who does not have the capacity to offer the message of peace to the world at large. But what is needed now is the soulful willingness.