When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlighenment and comfort at top speed

Where you can see tribal behavior now is in this business about teaching evolution in a science class and intelligent design. It's the scientists themselves are behaving tribally.

Two radical ideas have been introduced into human thought. One of them is that energy and matter are pretty much the same sort of stuff. That's Einstein. The other is that revenge is a bad idea. Revenge is an enormously popular idea but, of course, Jesus came along with the radical idea of forgiveness. If you're insulted, you have to square accounts. So this invention by Jesus is as radical as Einstein's.

He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.

The computer revolution has allowed white-collar criminals to do what the Mob would have loved to do - put a pawnshop and a loan shark in every home!

Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.

The heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality and the heartbreaking impossibilty of lying about it