Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.

What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?

Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.

The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.

I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.

Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.

The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.

The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of a remarkable Christian forebearance among men.

I started out typing and filing and answering the phones for a little nine-person firm. And that nine-person firm gave me my chance to find my own way.

At the core of life is a hard purposefulness, a determination to live.

What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.

It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.

Belief isn't always easy. But this much I have learned--- if not enough else--- to live with my eyes open.

I get recognized now and again, but the paparazzi aren't following me around.

Praise has different effects, according to the mind it meets with; it makes a wise man modest, but a fool more arrogant, turning his weak brain giddy.

You have to have fear to take risks - and I want to at least try.

A fool with a plan can outsmart a genius with no plan.