Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Learn to be your own best friend first then you will find true happiness, because happiness is from within.

So much for a great opening speech, that sucker done tucked tail and is hiding in the deepest part of my brain, sucking its thumb.

Yes I was burned but I called it a lesson learned. Mistake overturned so I call it a lesson learned. My soul has returned so I call it a lesson learned...another lesson learned

I am proud. It will get me into trouble someday, but today it makes me brave

Ethan didn't mind his blood being taken - he just disliked the fact that it had to be sucked through a needle in order to do it.

There is no elevator to success. You have to take the stairs.

I think everything has some politics to it. It's just whether or not it admits to it. Politics is weird. I don't even know what that means any more.

It is tough to say what has influenced me the most because I know that Mozart makes me think better, but you cannot beat Dave Matthews for feeling good!

Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.

I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.