How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?. . . . The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.
I never think about anything in my brain. I think in very small repetitive circles inside my own brain. That's why I'm a writer. It's the only way I get any sort of conclusion or understanding about anything.
What sort of sap doesn't know by now that picture-perfect beauty is all done with smoke and mirrors anyway?
The great advantage of the sort of education I had was precisely that it made practically no mark upon those subjected to it.
When I was 19 I went to art school. I had six months of teaching myself to play baritone ukulele under my belt so I was sort of a novice folkie. . . I was singing folk songs at that time.
Pigs are very intelligent. They're very misunderstood. Yet they're sort of man's unofficial best friend.
But the name Magnus Bane made him think of a towering sort of figure, with huge shoulders and formal purple warlock’s robes, calling down fire and lightning. Not Magnus himself, who was more of a cross between a panther and a demented elf.
You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.
Here I sit, sober and perhaps even lucid, on the sort of winter's day that makes you realize a New Year is just around the corner and you've got very little to show for it, but if you are going to get anything done on this planet, you better pick it up with both hands and DO IT YOURSELF.
I feel like in a conversation if things get said and then repeated, it sort of becomes inherently part of the narrative whether you want it to be or not.
You use words like 'introvert' and 'extrovert,' various traits of a personality. A lot of that stuff, we used in drama school, and that was kind of interesting, to realize my teachers sort of ripped off a lot of Jung. And how much of it is part of our society now, these phrases, introvert and extrovert, where it actually came from.
I was a shy, awkward sort of a boy and my fathers frequent absences from home, along with my hero worship for him, made me even shyer.
There were studies that asked people in different cultures to draw pictures of their enemies, and the pictures all looked remarkably the same. They always had exaggerated canine teeth and a certain sort of expression. That led to speculation about whether at an earlier stage in the human experience we were hunted by some sort of carnivore.
As part of my Christmas present I'd be giving chickens to a family in Nepal through the Heifer Foundation. I think they expanded my world when I was young to know sort of the other issues that were going on globally.
a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm
I've always liked pop music. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the avant-garde rock scene, because I think I was sort of swimming the wrong way, really.
Most people tire of a lecture in ten minutes; clever people can do it in five. Sensible people never go to lectures at all. But the people who do go to a lecture and who get tired of it, presently hold it as a sort of grudge against the lecturer personally. In reality his sufferings are worse than theirs.
Dilettantism is the sort of thing one must avoid.
It's miraculous how much easier the computer has made my sort of work.
I'm a solitary sort, I get chaffed by too many elbows.