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

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.

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.

At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.

Nothing releases like forgive. Nothing renews like forget.

You are who you are what you say you are to people, but who are you when no one is watching?

It is men who face the biggest problems in the future adjusting to their new and complicated role.

Time-our youth-it never really goes does it? It is all held in our minds.

You can write anytime people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.

I was born in New Orleans, and I wasn't allowed to go to the movies.

No matter what eyewitness testimony is in the court of law, it is the lowest form of evidence in the court of science.

Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently.

The finest productions of human art are immensely short of the meanest work of Nature. The nicest artist cannot make a feather or the leaf of a tree.

There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of the spirit.