I don't want people to love me. It makes for obligations.

We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck, and, ask anyone, the house is never burgled, and the ship never goes down.

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.

However tight I shut my eyes, there will always be a stray dog somewhere in the world who'll stop me being happy.

Believe me; all evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.

The object of art is to give life a shape.

Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.

Our entire life, with our fine moral code and our precious freedom, consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.

Each of us has a day .. when he has to accept, finally, the fact that he is a man.

The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.

The object of art is to give life shape.

I do the same with my books...Nothing like a good argument in the margins with someone who's already said all they have to say on the subject.

Goodbye worry, fear, doubt, and guilt. Hello grace.

If you're not writing, you're wronging.

The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.

New York is a city where it's particularly hard to be poor, not only because everything costs twice as much as it does elsewhere but because over-the-top affluence is part of its identity.

I believe that in music and in a lot of things it's kind of like surfing, you can have a really big wave sometimes and then you can have a smaller wave.

I pay tax, and I pay federal tax, too. But I have a write-off, a lot of it's depreciation, which is a wonderful charge. I love depreciation.

If you can be your own force of nature and have a positive heart, then you can actually do something good in the world.

Well, I'm a big believer in 'never say never.

If you hit a hole in one every hole, you wouldn’t play golf for very long.