Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.

Change was not something you waited for, quietly, mutely, in a house by the ocean, nothing would ever change unless we forced it into shape.

Life peels us like an onion and every layer is softer and sweeter.

IT’S NOT THAT ANYONE CAN BE A HERO, BUT THAT A HERO CAN COME FROM ANYWHERE. BUT THE KEY IS THAT THEY HAVE TO HAVE SOMETHING INSIDE THEM. A SPARK. A SENSE OF MORALITY. A YEARNING.

Racism breeds racism in reverse.

Streetlife serenaders Have no obligations Hold no grand illusions Need no stimulation.

My mother's passion for something more, to write a different destiny for a dirt-poor farmer's daughter, was to shape my entire life.

Sometimes when you're at your most certain, that's when everything you know is wrong.

It is not something I must do but something I want to do.

I was just delighted to be a legitimate, for-real published author.

I have no religion, but I can't escape being extremely Jewish ethnically - that is, culturally. In other words, I'm not religious, but I worry and I'm neurotic. And I'm very good with money.

Before I became the 'Great Test of the West," I was the 'Beast of the East.'