Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.

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.

Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.

It's amazing how photography can capture just a split second of something exquisite.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

Encounter: Doubt, Shame, Humiliation. It will finally be worth it. Acting is more about courage than anything else.

The Oscar is the most valuable, but least expensive, item of world-wide public relations ever invented by any industry.

I value all things as nothing in comparison with having the spirit of God to guide me.

In death, they all looked the same. This morning they spoke, they breathed, they kissed their loved ones good-bye. And now they lay dead. Gone forever.

Man is the only animal that is cruel. It kills just for the sake of it.

I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them.

The picture that looks as if it were done without an effort may have been a perfect battlefield in its making.