I do believe that people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime. One can appreciate and enjoy many geographies, but there is only one that one feels in one’s bones.

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.

When all else fails, philosophize.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

It sounded so weird when people called shoyu "soy sauce." It made it sound like Tabasco or something instead of the clean and perfect thing that it was.

For me the most important thing has always been tennis, and that's what I want to get across the image I want to portray is a hard-working tennis player.

Music is probably the only place I get energy from. Music and maybe watching a really tremendous performer, watching a terrific performer like Jagger or watching a great movie.

Love and a cough cannot be hid.

Boys never believe I can beat them, she told me back then. But I always win in the end.

Any guy afraid to die was a guy who was afraid to live.

The most important causes of political arrangements and acts are found in the nature and behavior of man.

I think because I write so many short stories, it's not that hard to come up with characters that are not me.

Less money for public media means less access to the arts.

Why don't people's hearts tell them to continue to follow their dreams? [...] Because that's what makes a heart suffer most, and hearts don't like to suffer.