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

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.

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.

Mitt Romney - he had a Rock Hudson thing going, shoeblack hair and a well-hung resume, but even for a shameless, position-shifting phony he seemed a trifle insincere.

Students should be told, how to think, not what to think.

Everyone lives by selling something.

Yeah, I like to gamble.

God isn't looking for people of great faith, but for individuals ready to follow Him

When you step into that boat you have made a silent commitment to your team that you will do everything in your power to help them win.

No matter how accomplished or how many awards you get, you're always still thinking there's somebody out there who's better than you.

Remember, Alan Greenspan was a member of Ayn Rand's collective. To understand this is to understand why we are doomed with the Federal Reserve

There is no treasure equal to contentment and no virtue equal to fortitude.

The development of man is a return to an original perfection.

Knowledge without repentance will be but a torch to light men to hell.