People who imagine themselves to be self-made seldom enjoy examining the process of manufacture in detail.

At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

You use simple brushstrokes in a screenplay for things over which you would take much greater pains in a novel.

Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?

What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.

Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.

I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.

Humor is my default mode.

Form may be of more account than substance. A lens of ice will focus a solar beam to a blaze.

The fingerprinting requirement affected only law-abiding citizens that want to buy firearms. It had no impact on Baltimore's criminal element at all.

I mean, think of Flint. I mean, think of the lead poisoning of thousands of poor and black children across the United States.

This imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.

I like to make an impression.

I very rarely get actually sad when ending a movie.

I understand regicide as a means of obtaining vengeance for the ruin of our lives, but regicide as a means of obtaining political freedom I could never understand.

Love is the door, it is irrelevant with whom you have fallen in love. Love redeems, neither Jesus, nor Krishna. Love redeems. Fall in love. Love is the only redeeming force. Love is the savior.

Christians know that Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been about.