Men and women can never be close. They can hardly speak to one another in the same language. But are compelled, forever, to try, and therefore even in defeat there is no peace.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.

Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

Nothing fails like failure

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?

The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.

I believe that anyone who wants to wear a thong should have to go through an application process.

I thought it'd be something cooler, like a van with 'Death to Demons' painted on the outside.

Cycling isn’t a game, it's a sport. Tough, hard and unpitying, and it requires great sacrifices. One plays football, or tennis, or hockey. One doesn’t play at cycling.

Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.

When we exhale, a tree breathes in.

Praise and reward create a system of extrinsic motivations for behavior. Children (and adults) end up taking action in order to receive the praise or rewards.

I had always loved comedy, and acted out Steve Martin and Bill Cosby albums with my sister for my parents on road trips and stuff, and I loved to laugh and make people laugh.

People don't know this, but early in your career, you don't just glide on to The Tonight Show.

What the Beatles did was something incredible, it was more than what a band could do. We have to give them respect.