Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.

Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.

In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.

We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.

The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t.

I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.

Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.

To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.

There are few things more powerful than people united.

Destiny and fate are of one’s own making, and riches and happiness are rarely found at the end of an easily-traversed path.

A breath of laughter will blow a Government out of existence in Paris much more effectually than a whiff of cannon-smoke

In the right hands, a comic strip attains a beauty and elegance that, really, I would put against any other art.

I would've liked to have been a better businessman when I was younger. And of course, I couldn't, because it wasn't part of my atmosphere. I never lived with accountants, I never lived with lawyers.

To me, Los Angeles and California and executive power are about big, open warehouse buildings. Tech companies are buying oversized buildings, because they project growth immediately.

The culture that's going to survive in the future is the culture that you can carry around in your head.

I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.

When I used to do the Edinburgh Festival, there was a bunch of guys selling fresh oysters and I'd eat ten daily - marvellous.

When you choose a managerial path, you are choosing to devote your life to people. Period.