“Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister—corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.”

“What's that sticky stuff called?

Basta: Duct tape.
Yes, duct tape. I love duct tape.”

“When the Twin Towers collapsed do you know what was in the basement? […] Lots of gold. Do you know where it is? […] Nobody does. It disappeared. Did those buildings drop down to cover a great crime being committed? Somebody is taking all this gold out of the Twin Tower basement. Makes you wonder.”

“The intellectual's struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview.”

“A work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force — they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.”

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.”

“The foundation is in place, and now we have to get to work.”

“Working hard for something we do not care about is called stress, working hard for something we love is called passion.”

“Whenever we [public officials] make a mistake, some-one jumps on us for it, but whenever we do something well nobody pays any attention to us. We never get any recognition except when we get ‘bawled out’.”

“We know in bodies only matter, and we observe the faculty of feeling only in bodies: on what foundation then can we erect an ideal being, disowned by all our knowledge?”