Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried.

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.

Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

We are the breakers of our own hearts

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

Please do not become so hurt by life that when someone loving comes along, or something good happens, you resist allowing the love and joy in.

Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.

Look what [Chinese] are doing, they're building a massive fortress against everything. A massive fortress in the South China Sea. And yet they're ripping us off.

Opportunities for education should be within the reach of every individual, not for the lucky few.

I find myself both as man and as myself something more determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see.

To me, Venice and Ocean Park were gaiety. I had not been allowed to go to those things as a youngster.

I tend to get starstruck with sports people. I was on a chat show with retired Scottish footballer Denis Law and I just lost it and couldn't talk to him.

I want to be one that is willing to do things that are not easy but that need to be done.

I cannot live without flowers everywhere. I grew up having a big garden, the size of a city block, in Rombas.

That's such a great thing about New York, after growing up in a place and being there for twenty plus years, there's still a whole island to discover.