A university is a city of ideas, and we're grateful you became citizens of our city.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me.

I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!

I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.

We've all had our moments of weakness, and if we manage to get through today without any, we'll be sure to have some tomorrow.

It's very easy to be judgmental until you know someone's truth.

After making several tragic movies in a row, I was looking to do a comedy, and one without cynicism.

I'm from the streets of New York. I know what tough talk sounds like.

I've been producing documentaries on global warming for 20 years and have seen the early warnings of extreme weather events come true.

One final bit of advice. The next time a senior administrator of the CIA tells you she has a national-security crisis Leave the bullshit in Cambridge.

You're supposed to trust friends. You have no reason to be his friend? That is part of the pleasure of friendship: trusting without absolute evidence and then being rewarded for that trust.

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people.

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract.