If finding an apartment is like falling in love, buying one is like proposing on your first date and agreeing not to see each other until the wedding.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

Wow. What'd he do to deserve that? Rescue orphans from a burning building? If so, you might want to make sure he didn't set the building on fire in the first place.

He is only fifteen! Does she really think he is prepared for marriage, especially with his intellectual range of a teacup?

Religion comes not where reign fundamentalism and authoritarianism.

I'm working harder than I have ever worked in my entire life, but what the hell, my life is my job now, and my job is my life and that's the way it should be.

I think people have a tendency to read into more than there is.

Giants. We must face them. Yet we need not face them alone.

Love / Through all the ups and downs the joys and hurts / Love / For better or worse I still will choose you first

It's always nerve-racking to take off your clothes on film. But doing it with a woman felt safer than with a man. You know you can say, 'Don't grab me there: That's where my cellulite is'!

Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.

Religion, for better or for worse, has been politicized in blatant ways that have seldom been equaled in American elections.