I think that friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we're children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they're scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it's pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.

It is fairly clear that many of the arguments against proposition testing are really arguments against propositions themselves.

The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey. The Breakers in the basement, making all the money.

We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives.

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.