Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

When all else fails, philosophize.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

Because a women's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

I know a lot and have written a lot and have thought a lot about motherhood.

At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.

It's only a game if there is an absence of meaning. And we've already gone too far for that.

Make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up.

No matter how big or successful and famous you become, if you do that, that's the most fulfilling thing, is making music that you love and that you're proud of.

If I wrote what I really think, I would be so sad all the time. We create to fill a gap - not just to avoid the idea of dying, it's to fill some particular gap in ourselves.

That's what I love about music...all these banalities suddenly turn into these beautiful, effervescent pearls.

I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen - like the iPod Touch's - although the pixel density could and should be much higher.

I think Hillary [Clinton] hears the anger in a broad swath of the American people, and she says, "OK, how do I help create a future that's good for you?"