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

How life did imitate art sometimes. And the cruder the art, the closer the imitation.

Just the act of cooking made her feel better, because cooking was life.

To me, the greatest thing in the world is downloading TV shows on iTunes because there are no commercials, and yet if I were a working stiff, I could never afford to do this. But I don't even think about money.

The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they're more entrenched than music.

Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.

A little arrogance (or even a lot) isn't such a bad thing, although your mother undoubtedly told you different. Mine did. "Pride goeth before a fall, Stephen", she said... and then I found out - right around the age that is 19 x 2 - that eventually you fall down, anyway.