Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

My own apathy is bone chilling.

In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.

It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.

But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.

Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.

Reading time is precious. Don't waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether.

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

I know that I sound like the joker, but the joker is a great character.

Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.

Americans have long recognized the need to protect our public lands and their vast resources

Genius ... is necessarily intolerant of fetters.

In Scotland, when people congregate, they tend to argue and discuss and reason; in Orkney, they tell stories.

It's never the changes we want that change everything.

A sexual revolution begins with the emancipation of women, who are the chief victims of patriarchy, and also with the ending of homosexual oppression.

Be sure to live up to your reputation for honesty and goodness, because many souls who believe you to be honest and good have placed themselves in your hands.

Never settle for average.

The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.