On one tour, I was collecting stories about pet monkeys. You'd be surprised how many people have stories about monkeys. The problem is, most monkey stories end tragically.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

It's hard to do, " I said. Wes looked at me. "What is?" I swallowed, not sure why I'd said this out loud. "Get it right.

It is very wrong to sleep in your make-up, but when you wake up the next morning, I think it looks very good.

Nobody goes through life without having their heart broken and one day you'll wake up and it'll be okay.

In my better moments, I think of apathy as purpose's sleep. In my worse moments, when I'm trying to fix it or get rid of it, I call it feeling lazy, depressed, or useless.

A lot of people voting for Pat Buchanan say they are doing so to send a message. Apparently that message is, 'Hey, look at me, I'm an idiot.'

Black child poverty is higher. As I write in the epilogue, "Yes we can. No he didn't. President [Barack] Obama didn't push black people backward, but he missed the opportunity to move us forward."

It is through an unbroken chain of witnesses that we come to see the face of Jesus.

I read the 'Deadpool' series back in the '90s. I'm not, like, a huge comic book reader, per say, though. I'll check out 'Archie' when I'm in the grocery line, but that's about it.

The success of Yoga must not be measured by how flexible your body becomes, but rather by how much it opens your heart.

Especially in this Internet age, routine practices are being exposed and rightly recognized as harsh and cruel.