Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Some choices, once you make them, they stay made.

My workday begins around 11 A.M., with a cup of black coffee in each hand. If I had more hands, there would be more coffee.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

It's hard for me to imagine that some people in the CIA who had firsthand knowledge would be unable to recognize that this would be helpful information for a soldier's death.

I think men know to seduce women though words and conversation and nice gestures. That's much sexier than when a man uses muscle.

Every dog has like me the impulse to question, and I have like every dog the impulse not to answer.

Good news for senior citizens: Death is near!

Everybody is going to have their critics. It's easy to get discouraged in life.

I was raised never to carp about things and never to moan, because in vaudeville, which is my background, you just got on with it through all kinds of adversities.

Your character defects are not where you're bad, but where you're wounded. But no matter who or what causes the wound, it's yours now and you're responsible for it.