I do find the values in A Christmas Carol significant. It is important not to be mean and stingy and not to give up love for money.

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.

It's a big world, and I really like it.

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, EVERYTHING.

Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.

...and the worse the memory, the stronger its stranglehold on the present.

He’d lapped at her ankles like a lovesick pup, and she’d been exactly what she was now, a woman born too beautiful and too rich to worry about a small thing like integrity.

Have you ever considered that there might be something wrong with your brain?Oh, I think there might be something wrong with everyone else’s.

Your fears are not walls, but hurdles.

madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom

The past is more than a memory.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing.

There is nothing so great that I fear to do it for my friend; nothing so small that I will disdain to do it for him.