Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

What is yours will be yours without any fight.

To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.

American poetry to me is a sort of relentless, nonstop sermon on human autonomy.

I try and write honestly about what I see around me now.

The legal profession is a business with a tremendous collection of egos. Few people who are not strong egotistically gravitate to it.

I've always loved comic books, which is why I've done films like Hulk and The Punishers.

The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.

It's bad enough to feel insignificant, but it's unbearable to have it grained into your soul that you will never, can never, be anything but insignificant.

That I want to destroy British imperialism is another matter, but I want to do so by converting those who are associated with it.

Tattoos are so widespread, so ugly and so very, very permanent. You can, in theory, have them removed - but a large chunk of your living flesh will go with it.