Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.

It's a big world, and I really like it.

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, EVERYTHING.

He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love.

The redundancy of flesh, he thinks, the helplessness of meat, how can we conjure spirit from a bone?

Regrets begin the moment we're comfortable with settling.

One of the challenges for lawyers can be explaining, first of all, what the legal issue is and, second, its significance. And both of those are important.

I have a terrible attention span, so if something can keep my attention, I know that that's at least a great start.

There's different levels of where we do well throughout Europe. Fortunately, for us, it's pretty great all throughout it.

New York is a lovely city. It is an easy city to go back to and an easy city to leave. Every time I go there I immediately make travel plans.

Success is on the other side of your comfort zone.

It is precisely because we cannot see God that we can only know that our prayer is valid by the effect it has upon our lives, by the way we treat our neighbor.