Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

It's what you do that makes your soul.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Life is mostly pain and struggle

There's a light somewhere.It may not be much light butit beats the darkness.

You only truly believe that which moves you to action.

My public caricature - that of a self-confident alpha male - is only partly accurate.

Can one be fully human without experiencing tragedy? The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that.

With all the technology we're inventing and what they're coming up with scientifically, people are having longer lifetimes. It's scary, but in the same sense it's also very exciting.

The US government still has no idea what documents I have because encryption works

I'm not really much into politics, because it's rarely discussed in my line of work.

The word compositon moved me spiritually and I made it my aim in life to paint a composition. It affected me like a prayer and filled me with awe.