The villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least.

There are two ways to look at life. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don't realize it.

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don’t really “need” anything new, so we only create what we want.

The falling flakes were random and without purpose; the snow was drunker than she was.

In New York, people are unhappy on purpose, because unhappiness makes them seem more complex; in Washington DC it just sort of works out that way.

The Sims is an escapist vehicle for people who want to escape to where they already are, which is why I thought this game was made precisely for me.

Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we’re simultaneously cowardly and arrogant. We don’t know the answers, so we assume they must not exist. But they do exist. They are unclear and/or unfathomable, but they’re out there. And—perhaps surprisingly—the only way to find those answers is to study NBA playoff games that happened twenty years ago. For all practical purposes, the voice of Brent Musburger was the pen of Ayn Rand.