You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.

Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts.

The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.

For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.

If you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you're able to find them in more places.

I think this dichotomy or opposition between work and play, between leisure and serious stuff, is definitely a bad way of thinking about the useful insights that play provides.

Play is this process of operating the world, of manipulating things. It's related to experimentation, and it's related to pleasure, but not defined by it.

We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.

It's not even that finding laundry pleasurable or delightful should be our goal rather than finding television delightful. It's that both laundry and television can be delightful.

The whole idea of play is in finding, acknowledging, and then working with the natural constraints and limitations that you find in the world.

There's just an enormous vast universe of possible intrigue out there and why not pay attention to it? Because then you're not burdened with trying to find that meaning in yourself all the time.

We only reach true wisdom when we accept that we have probably forgotten far more than we now remember.

Strive for perfection, knowing it will never be achieved.

It was true. She was his soul’s star. His heart ignited every time she came into the room, flared with every just-so gesture. Anything she touched became instantly talismanic.

There is an absolutely fundamental hostility on the part of totalitarian regimes toward religion.

The comedy I like the best is comedy I can't do, stuff that doesn't touch my arena.

I have a little dog who likes to nap with me. He climbs on my body and puts his face in my neck. He is sweeter than soap. He is more wonderful than a diamond necklace, which can't even bark.

Bach is the beginning and end of all music.

There are things in our blood that are just naturally passed down to us, whether we want to recognize them or not.

The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.

The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.