Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.

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.

Self-love is not opposed to the love of other people. You cannot really love yourself and do yourself a favor without doing other people a favor and vice versa.

A plague upon it when thieves cannot be true one to another!

I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God - I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least.

If you go in in the morning and have had a rough night, dunking your face in ice water is really good.

A small business person has Uncle Sam as a partner, a partner who puts up no money, does no work, and wants 30 or 40 percent

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

[What's beautiful about my mother is] her compassion, how much she gives, whether it be to her kids and grandkids or out in the world. She's got a sparkle.

Human sacrifice is much in vogue right now. The Republican right thinks that people who get on its nerves, especially women, should be sent to the stake. . .

Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.