The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.

I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.

Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.

We dress them [children] in the presumptions of the world. They are the bright small face of hope. They are the last belief we have, the belief in making them believe.

Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.