We secretly know that being seen as nice is the same as being nice in actuality. If you present yourself as a nice person, that becomes the prism for how your other actions are judged. The deeper moti...
No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either. Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps no...
I suppose we'll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, I did it because I'm a dirty dog. This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, I got 99 probl...
Here's in extreme example: the possibility of life after death. When considered rationally, there is no justification for believing that anything happens to anyone upon the moment of his or her death....
During the 1970s (and particularly because of Vietnam), it slowly became standard for absolutely everyone to go to college, particularly if they had no desire to get a real job. One of the results was...
Coldplay songs deliver an amorphous, irrefutable interpretation of how being in love is supposed to feel, and people find themselves wanting that feeling for real. They want men to adore them like Llo...
Why do you keep saying that he asked in response Apples and oranges aren't that different really. I mean they're both fruit. Their weight is extremely similar. They both contain acidic elements. They...
Why do we get out of bed? Is there any feeling better then being in bed? What could possibly feel better than this? What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lyi...
Whenever I can’t sleep, I like to lie in the darkness and pretend I’ve been assassinated. I’ve found this is the best way to get comfortable. I imagine I’m in the coffin at my funeral, and people from...
What those anti-cookie-baking mothers wanted me to do was turn baseball into soccer.
We are remembered for the totality of our accomplishments, but we are defined by the singularity of our greatest failure. It does not matter what you have been right about, and it does not matter how...
Take George W. Bush: He was an unpopular two-term president. Three times, his approval rating dropped to 25 percent. [To be fair, he also had the highest approval rating of all time, very briefly. But...
Styx and The Stones may break my bones but 'More than Words' will never hurt me
Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.
Every one of Joel's important songs--including the happy ones--are ultimately about loneliness. And it's not 'clever lonely' (like Morrissey) or 'interesting lonely' (like Radiohead); it's 'lonely lon...
Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy.
Before the 1975 fight in Manila, Ali bragged about attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting; he met with the KKK’s leadership because they agreed on the issue of interracial marriage (both sides saw it as an...
A ten-year-old boy doesn’t want a hyper-dexterous giant to choke, just as a ten-year-old girl doesn’t feel good when Britney Spears has a nervous breakdown on live TV. Only an adult can feel good abou...
So this, it seems, is the key for authors who want to live forever: You need to write about important things without actually writing about them. I
Let's face it: Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love. When a movie reviewer calls a film realistic, everyone knows what that means--it means the movie has an unhappy endi...