How do you know when an apology is true—when it means something, or can change something, or will last outside the moment?

Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.

I believe friends enclose us, like a pair of parentheses. Each one knows us differently, each sustains us in a different way.

Words are the weights which hold our history in place.

You know how a river goes on and on? That's my love for you.

Nature is not the number-one mystery, I’ve learned. It’s the heart that takes top honors.

Forgiveness, which is the place that every story turns, the chance we give each other.

Nothing erodes [a mother's love]. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things-hard as the rock of this earth.

We grow too old to lose old friends.

In high school, my desire for friendship far outweighed my talent for it.

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

You got beat up. Bones and bruises heal. Those girls didn't win because they didn't do what they wanted. They wanted to break you. I was already broken."You're not broken at all.

When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.

Please tell me you did not bring me out here so you could tell me a very boring story about your sister.

When I look back on my life, I don't have regrets about what I didn't do. If I'd become a musician, it could have ruined my life.

From my experience, the only thing you can do is take what's written on the page and try, through your own curiosity and investigation, to make it your own and honor what the original intent was.

To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor.

I was with Ted Turner when he came to see Kofi Annan - the Secretary-General of the UN - to announce his decision to put $1 billion to the service of UN projects and programs.

Poor people choose now. Rich people choose balance.

I liked to play dress-up.