The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.

I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do... Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

Any genuine work of art generates new work.

I believe that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love.

Yes, success is everything. Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are.

The death of God left the angels in a strange position.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.

You empower what you fight.You withdraw power from what you release.

Think about it - pro wrestling as an Olympic sport would be pretty cool. Look at figure skating or gymnastics - what is it? It's a choreographed performance that is judged.

Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same!

I was hoping to get a reception like this, I'd just hoped that it would be on Thursday night instead of Tuesday night.

There's nothing routine about 'Boardwalk Empire.' It's like being in some secret society where they call you up and tell you where to go: 'Meet us at the corner of such and so.'

Competitive advantage is a companys ability to perform in one or more ways that competitors cannot or will not match.

I was the world's ugliest baby. I have photos of my folks leaving the hospital with sacks over their heads... I asked my mother how to turn off the electric fan. She said 'Grab the blade!

Questions of such gravity go down to the very foundations of the government. If the provisions of the Constitution can be set aside by an act of Congress, where is the course of usurpation to end?

It would be the ultimate dream for me to win an Academy Award, be in love and have kids. Then I would say, 'Life is great! I have done everything I wanted.

You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?