There are four stages to marriage. First there's the affair, then there's the marriage, then children, and finally the fourth stage, without which you cannot know a woman, the divorce.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

The world of books is the only paradise there is.

If you've been hurt and you've grieved and you've been through the mill, it takes a long time to get over it.

Simply by living in this particular time and space, you're doing something nearly 100% of all other humans ever never could. Don't waste it.

The safest day at the Melody is St. Paddy's, " adds another Mardi Gras girl. "All the cops are out vomiting at the parade.

PREFACE PROBLEM: Nobody reads prefaces.SOLUTION: Call the preface Chapter 1.NEW PROBLEM CREATED BY SOLUTION: Chapter 1 is boring.RESOLUTION: Throw away Chapter 1 and call Chapter 2 Chapter 1.

You can't let the good things people say make you feel too good, because you're going to let the bad things make you feel bad.

I'd like to put on buckskins and a ponytail and go underwater with a reed, hiding from the Indians... To me, that's sexy!

I began writing The Cold Song in the months following my fathers death, when I felt this sense of loss, disappearance, of being right in the middle of life and wondering: What now? How to proceed?

I'm not an economist and we all know economists were created to make weather forecasters look good.

It is a very heavy responsibility [to be a prime-minister] to make, but someone has to make it for our country and I am thrilled and honoured to have that opportunity and that responsibility.