Quotes to inspire and reflect

Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.

All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.

Yard by yard.

Life is hard.

Inch by inch.

Life is a cinch.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

All vagrants think they're on a quest. At least at first.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately.

It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.

How do you write women so well? I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

After all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.

A man's private thought can never be a lie; what he thinks, is to him the truth, always.

Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.

Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home.

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.

The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?