Christina Stead has a Chinese say, "Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us" or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

The ways we miss our lives are life.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.

Read at whim! Read at whim!

We can't tell our life from our wish

It is better to entertain an idea than to take home to live with you for the rest of your life.

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Except from the Americans—but every pearl has its oyster.

Abandoning civil society will leave the enemy in control, not by victory but by default.

There's no right way of writing. There's only your way.

I think great acting is about inhabiting a skin and transforming yourself.

As the old saying goes, I was simply looking for fan love, in Alderaan places.

My parents put everything in a trust fund for me. I won't get it until I'm 18, so I'll use it for college.

Sometimes I've looked at a plate of food and wondered if it wouldn't look better as a hat.

I'm like a blue-collar writer. I just sit down every day and I write.

Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.

Making an average pitch to average people, or having an average gala for average people isn't going to scale anymore. You've got to find the people who care. Those people are worth all of your time.

I try not to eat processed foods, well, ever. If it comes from a lab or a factory, I don't want it.