Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
I wish you’d help me look into a more interesting problem – namely, my sanity.
Being an American means never having to say you’re sorry.
Because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs. So people pretend there is drama where there is none.
Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?
Sometimes I wonder about the Creator of the Universe.
Never trust a survivor until you know how they survived.
What a bummer it is to be a human being.
I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.
The complicated futility of ignorance.
What passes for culture in my head is really a bunch of commercials.
There is no peace, I’m sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.
What is my definition of jazz? “Safe sex of the highest order.”
Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
Music makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it.
Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.
The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.