Some friendships are formed by a commonality of interests and ideas: you both love judo or camping or making your own sausage. Other friendships are forged in alliance against a common enemy.

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.

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

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.

Prayer is a connection from your heart with a force that is powerful beyond measure, loves unconditionally and impartially, and embraces you whenever you turn to it.

Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.

Back then: to be paid more, one needed to increase the number of things that are by him known. Today: to be paid more, one needs to increase the number of people by whom he is known.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

The reality is sobering: in the United States one in three girls will become pregnant before age 20, totaling more than 750, 000 girls per year.

Religion is a superstition that originated in man's mental inability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an orgainized institution that has always been stumbling to block progress.

I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.

Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.

And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid.

What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.