What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.

To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.

Don DeLillo

I can't not put humor in a book.

Albert Brooks

Read, read, read. Read everything-- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

William Faulkner

If your experiment needs a statistician, you need a better experiment.

Ernest Rutherford

Life is all about change. We constantly transform all our life. Struggle is nothing more than a signal and confirmation of the needed changes that are ahead of us on the road of our lives

Timothy Pina

True sorrow is as rare as true love.

Stephen King

Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was business; but now when great fortunes are only made by business: Business is war!

Christian Nevell Bovee

We talk little when we do not talk about ourselves.

William Hazlitt

...but I still think that to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favor of special creation.

E.J.H. Corner

It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject - whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber - to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.

Thomas Frank

Jesus didn't just give hugs; He also gave a hammer. Paul didn't just pass on holy kisses; he also tirelessly dealt out swift and holy kicks to the rear end of the ancient church. The Bible has the manly stuff intact, and that is why it is such a great mystery how it got lost in the modern church.

Eric Ludy

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

Erich Fromm