Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.

So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through time, so I accept that.

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

They're not parallel at all. They're my concerns, but how they're expressed particularly on the page is completely divorced from who I am in my street life.

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

I advise people not to research radiation unless they are prepared to take the risks to their own health and mental functioning that the various forms of radiation are known to present to the human.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

You don't want me here, I don't wanna be here, so why am I here?

A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to.

I like to say that Bobby Fischer was the greatest player ever. But what made Fischer a genius was his ability to blend an American freshness and pragmatism with Russian ideas about strategy

Man is the mirror God holds up to himself, the sense organ with which he apprehends his being.

By patting somebody on the back, a boy or a girl, a professional dancer, male, female, it really makes people feel good and I know it certainly made me feel good.

He handed her the other half of his candy bar. She stared at it like it was a brick of gold. "I'm on a diet." But she took it. "A see-food diet, apparently. I see food and I eat it.

Women think of being a man as a gift. It is a duty. Even making love can be a duty. A man has always got to get it up, and love isn't always enough.

Come Sleep! Oh Sleep, the certain knot of peace, the baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, the poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, the indifferent judge between the high and low.