It's usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things.

Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.

I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It's not a wine, it's a life, right there in the glass.