If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'.

On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.

Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.

You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning 'til dee sun come up.

Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.

Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots.

She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.

salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.

There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence.

All dreams continue in the beyond.

Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.

The risks of liberty we must let everyone take

Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you've finished just to stay near it.

When silence greeted her question, she looked at Caine—for that was how he saw himself in that moment and in all the moments after: his brother’s murderer.

Money is a never-ending problem.

The true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.

Remember always, everyone has a place of perfect belonging, and if they leave that place without permission, sometimes they must be returned.

For decades, the violence in the Middle East has claimed a multitude of innocent civilian victims: Men, women and children, Arab and Israeli.

Master of the universe is every man's potential insight, cosmic potential.

It's tough to stay married. My wife kisses the dog on the lips, yet she won't drink from my glass.

There really is nothing I ever had access to that I didn't appreciate.