"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense."
— Jane Austen

"Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self Reliance)

"My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite."
— William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin

"It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."
— C.S. Lewis

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
— Voltaire

"I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?"
— John Lennon

"He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
— Emily Brontë

"Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!"
— Emily Brontë

"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city."
— George Burns

"You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames."
— Lloyd Jones

"Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio, and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody's high!"
— Stephen Colbert (I Am America: And So Can You!)

"If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went."
— Will Rogers

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
— Jane Austen

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

"I cannot live without books."
— Thomas Jefferson

"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace."
— John Lennon

"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That's my religion."
— Abraham Lincoln

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
— Benjamin Franklin

"To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead."
— Bertrand Russell

"Religion. It's given people hope in a world torn apart by religion."
— Jon Stewart

"How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself."
— Anaïs Nin

"When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have. The course of history shows us that as a government grows, liberty decreases."
— Thomas Jefferson

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"He who stands for nothing will fall for anything."
— Alexander Hamilton

"Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something."
— Plato

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."
— Orson Welles

"Love truth, but pardon error"
— Voltaire

"It is better to be alone than in bad company."
— George Washington

"Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it."
— Mark Twain

"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut (Timequake)

"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all."
— Henry David Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers)

"There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love."
— Christopher Morley

"It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book."
— Maureen Corrigan (Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books)

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
— Samuel Johnson

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."
— William Faulkner

"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers"
— Voltaire

"Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you."
— Neil Gaiman

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."
— Stephen King

"Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding."
— Stephen King

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
— Benjamin Franklin

"I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he less savage than the other savages."
— Mark Twain