The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.

The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.

Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.

Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.

He who will lose a present good for one in expectation hath some wit, but a small store of wisdom.

For years I have read the morning paper and harrumphed. There's a lot to harrumph about now.

We're fighting internal struggles, I am the cancer for my own cure.

Racism is a learned affliction and anything that is learned can be unlearned

Comedy is hard to do. All the cliches about it are true.

Play before you get good, because by the time you get good, you're too old to play

Such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.

The only thing infinite is our capacity for self-deception

Life never gives you what you deserve but what you decided.