People want somebody to be a daredevil, even if they're not going to be a daredevil themselves.

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.

Christmas is a bold act of emboldening sacrifice and the most selfless gift ever granted the rebellious lot that we are.

I have a simple philosophy: Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches.

The more I've done work with the IOC the more I've come to realize I'm really excited about this, the work that I'm doing and the impact that I can have if I'm fully committed to it.

Most of the myths that we carry about spirituality are because we have been dominated by this hyper-masculine trance.

Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?" "So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.

Memory is man's greatest friend and worst enemy.

You can't be afraid to fail because that's when you learn.

One of the greatest things my therapist said to me ... and it really blew my mind in the greatest way, he just said, "Look in the mirror less."

I really wanted to emphasize the idea of the women being isolated and abandoned . . . and they weren't raised to take care of themselves, so they had to learn to survive.

The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.