Vulnerability is the curse of the thinking classes.

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.

Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential self.

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.

Unconsciousness of self is not so much unselfishness as it is the mental ability to extinguish all thought of one's self - exactly as one turns out the light.

On our way home we were waiting for the bus when a very fat, pompous-looking woman reeled out of a pub shouting, "Melancholia? Ad nauseam."

I have the endorsement of the Sierra Club, and I'm very proud of that.

His wife's a brand of Christian that forbids a gathering that involves young women dancing in the streets but not races where men die

Someone Hot is sometimes can't be the person they appear to be- except for their hotness... that cannot be denied.

These principles have been proclaimed by God, by the Church, by the Saints, by Christian reason and morals.

I would say 'The Master' was one of the most inspiring things I've ever got to work on.

If you are really effective at what you do, 95% of the things said about you will be negative.

The crazy people of the world...shouldn't get to win. If God won't make it better after they do have their shitty little victories, then ordinary people have to. They have to try, at least.

Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.