“Wait for those unguarded moments. Relax the mood and, like the child dropping off to sleep, the subject often reveals his truest self.”

Large cocktail parties are an infamous technique for ridding yourself of social obligations to people you usually don’t know well or like much, which is such an unpromising beginning that I’ve rarely known one that recovered and turned into a great party.

The way you dress is the billboard that tells perceptive people how you feel about yourself.

When you’re interviewing someone, you’re in control. When you’re being interviewed, you think you’re in control, but you’re not.

I think most working relationships could benefit by excluding personal matters from the office chatter.

It would be nice to feel that we are a better world, a world of more compassion and a world of more humanity, and to believe in the basic goodness of man.

For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth.

I didn’t get ahead by sleeping with people. Girls, take heart!

I don’t know about you, but I can never get enough David Letterman.

Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Parents of young children should realize that few people, and maybe no one, will find their children as enchanting as they do.

Celebrities used to be found in clusters, like oysters – and with much the same defensive mechanisms.

Children are God’s way of punishing us for having sex.

A conversation isn’t a competition.

The origin of a modern party is anthropological: humans meet and share food to lower hostility between them and indicate friendship.

When your child is in trouble, the first thing you do is blame yourself.

But for Muslims, everything that they don’t have on earth is what they get in heaven. They can drink, they can have sex. All of the forbidden pleasures on earth, you can have in paradise.

Obedience is detachment from the self. This is the most radical detachment of all. But what is the self? The self is the principle of reason and responsibility in us. It is the root of freedom, it is what makes us men.

You know, your species [humans] has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity in trying to destroy itself.

Writing is the thing that sustains me and keeps me going. It is a form of self-preservation for me.

I live by the simplest, perhaps facile command that Jesus ever gave, which is to love God with the whole self and the neighbor as the self, and I find that’s entirely consuming. To do those two things leaves me very little time to do much else.

I was being called to surrender the very citadel of my self. I was completely in the dark. I did not really know what repentance was or what I was required to repent of. It was indeed the turning point of my life.

The one thing which you have to abandon unconditionally is your self.

Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.

People sinking into self-pity and depression are dreary, but they can’t get out of it by themselves. So every now and then, just sit there and listen, and listen, and listen. You’re paying your membership dues in the human race.