Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.

When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.

I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.

The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn.

I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.

Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.

A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius.

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.

One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep.

I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book.

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

How could we have found, who we really are, without education?

I'll never stop dreaming that one day we can be a real family, together, all of us laughing and talking, loving and understanding, not looking at the past but only to the future.

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

Don't pretend to be a journalist if you're not a journalist.

A lot of people have a particular song that, no matter their mood, turns them on. With me, it's Eleanor Rigby.

Everybody's dream is to be in the big leagues, but only one in a million gets here.

I left with nothing and needing to begin a new career.

We have met the Alien and it is us.

Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.

It's awesome to realize that if your greatest potential talent is for riding a bicycle upside down on a high wire, you will somehow discover it.