But no matter how many times we re-rank the presidents, in another 200 years, the top presidents will still be Washington and Lincoln and Jefferson, because they defined what a president is. They are the idea, and you can't be better than the idea.

I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything.

I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack.

Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840.

Booze is the greatest of all equalizers. Rich drunks and poor drunks both pass out the same way.

In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.

As more and more people recognize the level of violence involved and the consequences of CTE [chronic traumatic encephelopathy, a degenerative brain disorder], they're obviously going to say "We don't want this to be a part of culture." And they overlook the fact that there's a huge swath of the populace where physicality is still a real common thing.