By and large... the good's an illusion, little fables folks tell themselves so they can get through their days without screaming too much.

I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life’s essential absurdity.

Weird love's better than no love at all.

I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.

These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored.

Superhero movies and comic books teach a lesson that runs directly counter to the culture-of-violence idea: guns are for bad guys too cowardly to fight like men.

Zombies are the new vampire.