A human being can spend only so much time outside her comfort zone before she realizes she is still tethered to it.

Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality.

Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who know where their high school yearbook is and those who do not.

If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner, to call you when they land, you can't afford to be with them.

Unless you are a professional, you will find the tart to be a high-maintenance, unforgiving whistle-blower of a pastry.

I would gladly have accepted a heaping spoonful of nepotism when I got out of college and was looking for a job.

Book tours are such a little tapas meal of where I could live.

No affair that begins with such an orchestrated overture can end on a simple note.

Uniqueness is wasted on youth. Like fine wine or a solid flossing habit, you'll be grateful for it when you're older.

I like to try to do a little work before I do anything in the morning, even if it's a paragraph.

Besides God, there is no glory above coming from humble beginnings, from sleeping under a porous grass thatched mud hut to rising above and beyond tabernacles of greatness

Mass advertising can help build brands, but authenticity is what makes them last. If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble

I love to cook and I've cooked a lot of Bulgarian food over the years.

One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate - and remain forever scatheless.

Books crowbar the world open for you.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

They were French, they were Jews, and they were you.

I don't have an attitude, I have standards for the people who are supposed to be my friends.

Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or being.