My mother is a firm believer in the long pause, useful in interrogations, proclamations of truth, and the occasional cutting dead of someone without their knowing it.

Delusion detests focus and romance provides the veil.

I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.

In so many senseless deaths, beauty is to blame.

Why is edamame always ready to expire? It´s so urgent for a vegetable. Edamame. It sounds like an assisted form of suicide. Is there an advertising concept in this?

I used to loathe ambivalence now I adore it. Ambivalence is my new best friend.

The snag about marriage is, it isn´t worth the divorce.

They feel life is for the taking, and that everyone deserves happiness no matter what the cost. I must remember these tricks if I ever decide to have my soul surgically removed.

Surprises, I feel now, are primarily a form of violence.

I love you as the mother of my child": the kiss of death.Mother of His Child: demotion. I am beginning to see this truism: Mothers are not always wives. I have been stripped of a piece of self.

He announces that lately he keeps losing things. "Like your wife and child, " I want to say, but don´t. At fourty, I´ve learned not to say everything clever, not to score every point.

When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation.

I love originating shows and originating songs - there is nothing better than being the first one to get to do a song.

It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.

Did you know the pen is stronger than the knife: they can kill you once but they can't kill you twice.

Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.

It's clear enough that there was substantial fraud in Ohio, thus delivering the Electoral College vote for President Bush.

Properly speaking, should any individual ever have exact, clear knowledge of his own core consciousness?" "I wouldn't know," I said. "Nor would we," said the scientists.

My mother was a Northern woman, daughter of Hon. John Sergeant, a distinguished lawyer, and for many years representative in Congress from Philadelphia.

You can't plan for the future, because some guy's going to land in a spaceship with three heads and a big beak and take over everything.

He’s like the Rasputin of reapers.