The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

Long lives aren't natural. We forget that senior citizens are as much an invention as toasters or penicillin.

Too much free time is certainly a monkey's paw in disguise. Most people can't handle a structureless life.

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

Nothing very very good and nothing very very bad ever lasts for very very long.

A ring is a halo on your finger.

Blame is just a lazy person's way of making sense of chaos.

Cloning is great. If God made the original, then making copies should be fine.

Every single moment is a coincidence.

You can't fake creativity, competence, or sexual arousal.

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

If you have an impulse to kindness, act on it.

You can't get mad at weather because weather's not about you. Apply that lesson to most other aspects of life.

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.

Making eye contact with adults while dressed as a clown is risky.

Eagles are seagulls with a good hairdo.

Everyone should have a tailor. David Wilkes, the guy who does my stuff, is like, 'Well you're a writer - do you want a special pen compartment or something?' Bespoke: That's the term you want to get out there.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

Royalty is either going to do very well with cloning, or it's going to disappear completely.

Adventure without risk is Disneyland.

If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?

In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop.

Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.

I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

I like being surrounded by good ideas. Every single time you walk past something you like, you get a blast of happy chemicals to the brain, and I like that.

Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

Fashionable people can opt out of the fashion stream, but a stylish person never becomes unstylish unless they hit their head on a rock and suffer brain damage.

When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that's emerging?

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one's taking.

I don't think I see the world in terms of stupid or clever, but in terms of being able to get irony. There's some awful statistic about only 20 per cent of Americans being able to understand irony.

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

I was so beautiful when I was young. And I took so few photos because I felt so skinny and ugly. I wish I'd just taken a few more shots.

Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?

Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.

There used to be a tradition of the loveable rogue who would steal from the honour boxes in churches and buy a round of drinks with the money he snagged. And everyone would find him tremendously good company. But not any more.

The 1990s felt like the 1990s in a real and good way.

When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.

Being asked what animal you'd like to be is a trick question; you're already an animal.

Bespoke tailoring: yes! I found this one pair of pants - they're Canali - and brought them into a tailor and said, 'Clone these, dammit.' They just do all the right things. I've got eight pairs in different colors and I never have to think about pants again. The only look otherwise that suits me is, like, the Professor from 'Gilligan's Island.'

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.