“Had they both become unwilling participants in some sort of mad scientist’s chemistry experiment to combine Man A with Woman B to see how quickly they’d combust?”

“Wisdom, as I see it, is not some sort of realization of how smart you've become, rather it's the ability to admit just how stupid you've been.”

“...I was more than just the sum of my experiences, and I had the ability to become an active participant in life instead of just standing on the sidelines.”

“[David] Maraniss sees [Barack] Obama as a man with "a moviegoer's or writer's sensibility, where he is both participating and observing himself participating, and views much of the political process as ridiculous or surreal, even as he is deep into it.”

“We see the man who blindly succumbs to a certain type of woman--how frequently a highly cultivated intellectual, for example, will become hopelessly entangled with the worst sort of strumpet because his feminine, emotional side is utterly undifferentiated; and equally familiar is the woman who for no apparent reason ties herself to a swindler or adventurer.”

“‎Literature is the equivalent of the climate scientist’s computer simulations: set up some new starting conditions, run the whole complicated process and see what happens.”