People ask me, 'Have you ever considered doing stand-up?' To me it would be less offensive if someone asked me, 'Have you ever considered dental implants?'

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.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body and prayer is to the soul.

Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country.

Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful idiots are always asking, "What's in it for me"?

Only an ethical movement can rescue us from barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals.

I now see Norman Thomas as indeed a liberal, but as a real, old-fashioned, unreconstructed liberal who believes in freedom and justice for everybody.

To insist on a spiritual practice that served you in the past is to carry the raft on your back after you have crossed the river.

Language is the light of the mind

I don't think of it as procrastination. I think of it as allowing my work to accumulate urgency.

What could be better in al-Qaeda's mind than to have India and Pakistan going at each other? What more to further their aims?

The humour of Dostoievsky is the humour of a barloafer who ties a kettle to a dog's tail.