“I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered wa...”

“That's what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call "personality", or maybe even "pain".”

“We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvar...”

“Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no.”

“Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn't," I said."So everybody alive must have the Survivor's Syndrome. It's that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me prou...”

“The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesnt have to be a...”

“As his dark closet shows, Bluebeard was a collector at heart, and even after dispatching a wife, could not let her fully depart.”

“I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]”

“They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped...”

“And not only that, I also have the MacBook Air which is really cool. Even my wife is jealous of my MacBook Air.”

“I'm incredibly competitive in all sports in a way that is so mystifying to my wife because she grew up playing the violin and piano. I've always been like that.”