Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Stay focus to fulfill your dreams.

You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect a new result.

As an adolescent, Spider-Man was what got me through tough times in terms of being a skinny kid.

I have held healthy respects of bears along with assorted crocodiles, snakes and lots of other animals. You know, bears are dangerous, you have to be super careful.

I have no doubt that the fundamental problem the planet faces is the enormous increase in the human population

Hairspray is the only movie I made that's subversive, because they're doing it in every high school in America. A man's playing a woman, and two men sing a love song to each other.

A change of circumstance happens as a result of a change in your state of consciousness.

The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.

The soul has been given its own ears to hear things mind does not understand.

Praise the child, and you make love to the mother.