Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.