Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

...the only difference between a young person at the height of their exuberance and a very old person who is frail and physically wasted is time.

A well-lived day is medicine unto itself.

No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.

What I like about stand-up is, it's truthful. I'm not up there trying to get laid or look cool. I'm up there because I really love it, and it makes people happier.

It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.

We've got a lot to gain and nothing to lose.

If you modestly enjoy your fame you are not unworthy to rank with the holy.

Welfare is the basic cause of the deleterious cultural changes we have witnessed in the West over the past 60 years.

I had a job on a newspaper in Wisconsin, and I started off as most reporters did back then: writing obits and free ad giveaways.

To be wicked does not insure prosperity - for the inn did not succeed well.