War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

Wounds may heal, but the scars remain.

One of the most destructive things that's happening in modern society is that we are losing our sense of the bonds that bind people together - which can lead to nightmares of social collapse.

Seafood is one of my biggest pet peeves.

If you want grown-ups to recycle, just tell their kids the importance of recycling, and they'll be all over it.

Virtue, like a dowerless beauty, has more admirers than followers.

I know club music has to be infectious and it's got to make you move.

...what makes humanity beautiful is our free will, our individuality, our endless striving in spite of our imperfection. BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON Chapter 27 Page 214

Luck was with me. I saw no spiders. Luck was against me. I saw no specters.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

If I was white I would have been like John Wayne... I feel like a tragic hero in a Shakespeare play