But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it's like to internalize all that chaos.

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.

Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.

We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?

Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.

Again the greatest use of a human was to be useful. Not to consume, not to watch, but to do something for someone else that improved their life, even for a few minutes.

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It's just not my thing anymore.

No matter the joy in heaven, its coldness will make you bask beside the flames of hell.

BEROWNE: What time o' day?ROSALINE: The hour that fools should ask.

The Italians are not indulgent, as Americans are. They don't have the patience to teach young singers how to move. They think you should learn in school.

I'm so over the moon that I have the opportunity to represent my country at a third Olympic Games.

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.

We must not trust in ourselves, but take the advice of our spiritual father, and recommend ourselves to everybodys prayers.

The corporate lobby in Washington is basically designed to stifle all legislative activity on behalf of consumers.

About 40 percent of my time is spent on social issues and building new organizations, more for the benefit of the climate or health issues.

Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.