I think ambition is a desire for recognition. People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.

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

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

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.

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

POLICE, n. An armed force for protection and participation.

Yet avarice is numbered among the sins, but stupidity omitted.

I made sacrifices willingly; it was what I did best.

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. That's why they call it artWORK!

I just try to play more and more difficult roles.

I've been a golden boy for too long.

I don't have any doubt that there's going to be a Democrat effort to impeach Trump.

Students, eh? Love 'em or hate 'em, you can't hit them with a shovel!

I probably am. I think Paul Giamatti also said in an interview that I was "f--king crazy." I'm flattered by that. I want to be that guy who's nuts who makes people think.