Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be.

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.

At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.

With 'Black Swan,' the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.

Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.

It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.

A lost election can have the jolt of a drop through the gallows door, leading to a dark night of the soul in which the future presses down like a cloud that will never lift.

Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.

Mitt Romney - he had a Rock Hudson thing going, shoeblack hair and a well-hung resume, but even for a shameless, position-shifting phony he seemed a trifle insincere.

Hands. Cheeks. Eyes. Lips.Neck. Ears.Thighs.Heart. Soul.Ahh!the things I get tosavor you with.

Smartass Disciple: Master, we should not spend our time to low life like them.Master of Stupidity: If I don’t, then how should I lead men like you to be wiser?

To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

When life takes away the forms that you thought were the foundation of your life, what's left? The life that needs no foundation - that is the foundation. The formless. The essence.

If you are weary of some sleepy form of devotion, probably God is as weary of it as you are.

No sense in talking tough unless you do it.

I will fight every single day to pass comprehensive immigration-reform legislation with a path to citizenship.

When I'm shooting, really the audience I'm thinking the hardest about is that first test screening audience who I want to like the film and that first opening weekend audience.

Touch is a freaky thing when you're not used to it. It makes you feel all kinds of things.

'He means well' is useless unless he does well.