I enjoy the hell out of writing but don't like what follows: promotion and publicity, which I always strive to keep to a minimum, sometimes to my publisher's dismay.

It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician--but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility.

Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting: that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any of us as are the present and the past.

Where there's cake, there's hope. And there's always cake.

Modesty is related to diffidence, diffidence is related to shyness, Shyness is a synonym for timidity, timidity is a characteristic of the meek, the meek do not inherit the Earth, they serve those who are self confident and self assertive.

The less depth a belief system has, the greater the fervency with which its adherents embrace it. The most vociferous, the most fanatical are those whose cobbled faith is founded on the shakiest grounds.

To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.