Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it started.

There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head... All right, my point is this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding onto his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.

The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

In the end we are all caught in devices of our own making. I believe that. In the end we are all caught.