But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

My own apathy is bone chilling.

In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.

It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.

Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.

Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether.

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

Life is never easy so that is why I never lie about my age. I want credit for every damned year.

Forgive me, " I wrote at the bottom. "I did not think I would break.

And in the end you will realise that everything you did, you did for you and for the people like you...

Would we believe their story of the dead, when they return?

Mozart is the human incarnation of the divine force of creation.

Donald Trump have proposed an approach that has a $4 billion tax benefit for your family.

You don't know you're going to get a 'No' until you ask, and if you don't ask, you've given yourself the No.

Theyʹre shooting at us,ʺ I said incredulously. ʺTheyʹre actually shooting at us!

I find that if you take the various popular song forms to their logical extremes, you can arrive at almost anything from the ridiculous to the obscene-or, as they say in New York, sophisticated.

I tour with a piano, actually. Luckily I am able to hire people that deal with it completely and magically a piano appears on stage and then magically disappears when I leave.

Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.