Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.

One of the surest ways to live a life that's full of disappointments, is to expect people to be perfect.

All you need is one thought and one word. When you learn how to connect them, you can do anything you like.

I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.

When we accept all of life's contradictions, when we can comfortably flow between the banks of pleasure and pain, experiencing them both while getting stuck in neither, then we are free.

Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.

Let [us] seek for wisdom instead of power and [we] will have all the power [we] have wisdom to exercise.

Letters are signs of things, symbols of words, whose power is so great that without a voice they speak to us the words of the absent; for they introduce words by the eye, not by the ear.

A commitment to love and justice demands the transformation of social structures as well as of hearts.

I can't give you the moon,” the tinker said. “She doesn't belong to me. She belongs only to herself.

Walter Mondale has all the charisma of a speed bump.