"The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member."

"I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room."

"In the future, torture will once again become the recreational sport of the rich."

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

"Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you."

"We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes."

"You can never become rich unless you like rich people."

"Adventure without risk is Disneyland."

"Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?"

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

"Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody's talking about these 100-hour movies called 'Breaking Bad'. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is 'Breaking Bad.'"

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

"Inasmuch as I am a spiritual man, I do believe in God - I think that He created anorder for the world; I believe that, in constantly bombarding Him with requests for miracles,we're also asking that He unravel the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracleswould be a cartoon, not a world."

"I'm pro-forwards. Do I want the Seventies to come back? No. The haircuts were terrible. Everyone stank. The food was awful."

"Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure."

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

"In our heads we're all about 33 years old."

"Unhappiness is something we are never taught about; we are taught to expect happiness, but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive."

"All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it's just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next."

"With Google I'm starting to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. People in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless."

"Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without."

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

"And the reason Luke is thinking about time and free will is because he believes that money is the closest human beings have ever come to crystallizing time and free will into a compact physical form. Cash. Cash is a time crystal. Cash allows you to multiply your will, and it allows you to speed up time. Cash is what defines us as a species. Nothing else in the universe has money."

"Figure out what it is in life you don't do well, and then don't do it."

"And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world."

"You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be."

"I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does."

"TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public."

"If I think too much about all of those Chinese factories where all the stuff in a Wal-Mart is made, I get that woozy feeling you get when you see ducks covered in crude oil."

"If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal."

"When you crop the photo, you tell a lie."

"When we constantly ask for miracles, we're unraveling the fabric of the world. A world of continuous miracles would not be a world, it would be a cartoon."

"You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss."

"If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure."

"Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living."

"The real killers in the business world aren't the ones who aim for the top, it's the ones who aim for two notches below the top."

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

"My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, 'Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.' And your parents are like: 'O.K., I'll quit my job. We'll move to an Alpine community.'"

"Technology favors horrible people."

"Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless people."

"Good-looking people with strong, fluoridated teeth get things handed to them on platters."

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

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

"It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California."

"We want our idols to be dead because it makes death a much less scary place."

"You're too old not to have had, how shall I say, certain experiences. You've had bad internet dates. You've had people be creeps to you. You've seen what you've seen; you've felt what you've felt. Ideology is for people who don't trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world, I feel like I am going mad. Madness is actually quite rare in individuals. It's groups of people who go mad. Countries, cults ... religions."

"Maybe the more emotions a person experiences in their daily lives, the longer time seems to feel to them. As you get older, you experience fewer new things, and so time seems to go by faster."

"I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger."

"A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out."

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