Paul Rudnick is a champion of truth (and love and great wicked humor) whom we ignore at our peril.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

The man who is not ‘sincere’ to others is not ‘sincere’ to his own self!

Tolerance is the price we pay for living in a free, pluralistic society.

This is me figuring good behavior is for someone much younger." --Kestrel

My own attitude to the innumerable injustices of life has always been a philosophical one, especially when they have tended to operate in my favour.

Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.

Any man who had to carry a child would cave in around month two.

I could be with a woman in a bed, for weeks even, and it would seem to me like three seconds. Or 300 years.

No more crying. It's all wetness and no comfort at all.

Something has to matter. Otherwise, a person's life will be miserable and empty.

People always say 'Motivation is great but it doesn't last.' I just tell them, bathing does not last either, that is why I recommend it daily.