There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.

I believe that sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between five, it's fantastic.

I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government.

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.

I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

I'm not a drinker, my body won't tolerate...eh...spirits, really. I had two martinis New Years Eve and I tried to hi-jack an elevator and fly it to Cuba.

Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.

I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.

My success has allowed me to strike out with a higher class of women.

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

“Only food and water are more important than music and privacy,” 

“On the road, I learned that the media are not reality; reality is reality.” 

“In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.”

“Always look at what people do, not who they are.” 

“Always look at what people do, not who they are.” 

“Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.” 

“I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other.” 

“I'm also now immune to politicians who say, "I've traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know..." I've traveled more than any of them, and I don't know.” 

“We learn most where we know the least.” 

“I've noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I'm energized by listening to people's stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That's the work of an organizer.” 

“What we’re told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.” 

“We are all trained to be female impersonators.” 

“The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!” 

“I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.” 

“Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.” 

“We are so different, yet so much the same.” 

“Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self-willed journey—and to be welcomed when she comes home.” 

“Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.” 

“Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” 

“It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit.” 

“I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.” 

“YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING. YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING

“Laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third and when we suddenly see a new reality...laughter is an orgasm of the mind.” 

“Needing approval is a female cultural disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing.” 

“According to the wisdom of Indian Country on my own continent, it takes four generations to heal one act of violence. What” 

“Sometimes when I'm in the midst of all this, I can hear my mother saying, 'Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing your teeth.” 

“We need to unlearn our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves. It's worth taking time to demistify it. [...] All the things an adolescent can be [...] are reduced to a three digit number. [...] We too can decide how to value our education instead of letting them value us.” 

“the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.” 

“If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel.” 

“I remember Spider Woman from the first page of Leslie’s novel Ceremony. She is the Thought Woman who names things and so brings them into being. Until then, I had imagined myself alone in believing that spiders should be the totem of writers. Both go into a space alone and spin out of their own bodies a reality that has never existed before.” 

“I’ve learned from these events that self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the lives of individuals; that self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated; that citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform their countries; in short, that self-esteem is the basis of any real democracy.” 

“Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least.” 

“And I was angry because the media took racism seriously - or pretended to - but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.” 

“Like the spider spinning its web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed.”