It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he'd experienced it.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

In the quest for power, truth is always the first thing left behind.

There must be at least 500 million rats in the United States of course I am speaking only from memory.

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad things.

Music is split up now into little pockets.

We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become.

I don't putt face-on exclusively, but in the back on my mind I'm haunted by the notion that I'm sure it's the best way to putt.

It is, after all, only common sense to realize that, but for the fact that economic life is a process of incessant internal change, the business cycle, as we know it, would not exist.

I'm up in the woods, I'm down on my mind. I'm building a still, to slow down the time.

I am a fighter. I'm not just there to go along and get along.

If I can make people smile, then I have served my purpose for God.