Penn Jillette

I chose to love my friends. I chose to love my wife. I think I even chose to love my parents as I got older. But I had no say in loving my children. The love for my children is beyond my control. It`s animal. It`s like hunger. It`s more than hunger - there have been times I could control my hunger [...]. I love my children like I need to breathe.

There`s so much we miss by being stuck in time. But life is time, and nothing more.

Add eternal to anything, [...] and you get hell.

You could spend your life studying how to lie and use that to tell the truth.

We all want happiness for our children, but they don`t have to be happy about everything all the time. Life must include sadness, and there`s peace and truth to be found in sadness. The best times are not always the happiest times, but the times spent in the flow, the times spent getting things done, the times spent living.

You have no chance of scaring me with death, because all the fear possible is contained in life.

Death is nothing. I`m not afraid of nothing. But time passing is something different. I`m terrified of time passing. I tremble at the thought of my little girl growing up. I can`t face my son growing stronger than me and helping me up the stairs. I quake at the prospect of looking at my adult children`s faces with eyesight worse than I have now.

My desire for something impossible does not make it less impossible.

Wanting to believe something is not any reason at all to believe it. If anything, it`s a reason to question it.

We must always remember that we can never know what`s in someone else`s heart, but in order to function, we must guess.

I hope no one reading this book thinks that "The exception proves the rule" means that if you have an exception, it means the rule is true. That`s just bugnutty. I had it explained to me as "The exception tests the rule." Also not true. The exception does not test the rule - it disproves the rule.

Blackmail is just stock options; they are worth nothing unless I happen to believe they`re worth something.

The closer you come to death, the better the story.

No one in showbiz works as hard as anyone with a real job.

Life speeds by and no matter how much joy there is, there is sadness.