Used to be, conservatives revered the Average American, that Norman Rockwell oil painting of diner food, humble faith, honest toil, and Capraesque virtue.

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.

At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.

With 'Black Swan,' the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.

Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.

It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.

A lost election can have the jolt of a drop through the gallows door, leading to a dark night of the soul in which the future presses down like a cloud that will never lift.

Everyone is entitled to his own nostalgia.

I would never wound a cat's feelings, no matter how downright aggressive I might be to humans.

We cannot pretend that reality is different from what it is.

If you want a neat wife, choose her on a Saturday.

One day I'll be appreciated for what I do instead being held back for what I don't do.

No learning can make up for the failure to pray. No earnestness, no diligence, no study, no gifts will supply its lack.

The only Bible-honoring conclusion is, of course, that Genesis 1-11 is actual historical truth, regardless of any scientific or chronological problems thereby entailed.

Patience is the key to any battle.

Like many highly educated people, I didn't have much in the way of actual skills.

Fear stops a lot of people. Fear of failure, of the unknown, of risk. And it masks itself as procrastination.