We moved up to Oregon when I was eight, and I think the radical absence of Jewish life here might have strangely made me feel more Jewish. It's a contextual thing I guess.

Yo can’t reason someone out of something he didn’t reason himself into.

I would never ever condone any violence of any kind. But in the theater of fiction, blood is delightful.

I'm the type of spiritual person that doesn't speak openly about their spirituality. Irony is probably my religion.

Livability has always struck me as a consolation prize.

The debate analysis in the media is rampant with contest analogies of war, baseball, boxing, football; you name it. Any testosterone contest imaginable is fair game.

Technology requires knowledge and expertise more than it requires money.

I grew up with very little religious training. Actually, like, none. I think what Jewishness I felt as a kid stemmed almost entirely from this atrocity in our family tree.

I think these large bureaucratic institutions are created in some way explicitly to inoculate anyone from actual responsibility, to create a much more diffuse and blameless kind of society.

I found once you start writing about God it's really fun. It's like a rock singer saying "baby." "Baby, baby, baaayy-by." You start saying "God" on the page and you don't want to stop.

No traveler e'er reached that blest abode who found not thorns and briers in his road.

Two weeks is about the ideal length of time to retire.

Canadians are often a friendly bunch.

Nay, Sir, it was not the WINE that made your head ache, but the SENSE that I put into it' 'What, Sir! will sense make the head ache?' 'Yes, Sir, (with a smile,) when it is not used to it.

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Isn't the act of calling everyone a fool left and right the indication of a true fool?

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

It takes forty men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the air.

We don't need school to be better, we need schools to be really, really different.