A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains...

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.

Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.

The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

Violence begins with the fork.

I suppose I was a little bit of what would be called today a nerd. I didn't have girlfriends, and really I wasn't a very social boy.

Nothing is so tiresome to one's self, as well as so odious to others, as disguise and affectation.

An actors' tribute to me is in his work.

He who acknowledges a kindness has it still, and he who has a grateful sense of it has requited it.

The national strike of the miners in 1972 performed, I believe, a great service, not only to the miners, but the people in Britain today who wanted coal.

Men like to flirt with, and sometimes even date a wild child, but those women aren't usually first on their lists for marriage or motherhood.

I pray daily, not for more riches, but for more wisdom with which to recognize, embrace and enjoy what I already possess.

To Meath of the pastures, From wet hills by the sea, Through Leitrim and Longford, Go my cattle and me.

Never underestimate your life. It is most precious. You never know what talents are hidden within you and what you have to offer to the world!