Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.

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.

Familiarity increases carnality.

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

Social justice and compassion are compatible with an intelligent respect for private enterprise and law and order.

SOME YEARS, like some poets,and politicians and some lovely women, are singled out for fame far beyond the common lot, and 1929 was clearly such a year.

I think that part of being a good journalist, part of being an awake member of the world youre in, is to view yourself as an outsider, and I always have, to some degree.

Before doing my first open mic, I was sitting in the back watching all these comedians banter back and forth and fire jokes and up each other, and I thought, This is where I wanna be.

SECRET is not a mystery, it is analization.

Creativity is people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it.

Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.

I lift weights and I run, thats what I do.