We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.

I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it

Ender Wiggin must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way.

I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven't seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they're absolutely stupid.

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

We're like the wicked witch. We promise gingerbread, then eat the little brats alive.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you

There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.

We were built differently, locate you own calling and explore it

Some people, perhaps those with more dignity and less rage gnawing at the roots of their being, are nicer as failures, For me, it was like descending a deep pit that had no bottom

I love having a president who I think is smarter than I am.

Continuing to do stand-up is always a challenge because the audiences and the environments in which you work very often differ.

I am honored to be here as co-chair of President Obama's re-election campaign.

Most of us do more than subsist. From the vantage point of our ancestors, we live lives of almost unimaginable ease. Here again, we have innovation to thank.

I'd be vegetarian if bacon grew on trees

I’m a deeply broken person, and broken institutions fascinate me.

The same ten minutes that magazines urge me to use for sit-ups and triceps dips, I used for sobbing.