I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again.

I've been trying to garden all my life - it just happens that I haven't had a big garden...until the past few years.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.

Everybody is vulnerable through love of their children. Hostages to fortune.

The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.

By the time I went up to Cambridge, I was extremely quiet and well behaved, although I now meet people who remember me as not like that at all.

He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.

Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.

He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it.

I always try to travel light.

I am so busy being kind today that I have no time to complain.

But it was like a dance across a field strewn with razors, and I bled with every step I took.

If a decision-making process is flawed and dysfunctional, decisions will go awry.

I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live.

I must begin by saying something about the old Germany. That Germany, too, suffered from superficial judgment, because appearances and reality were not always kept apart in people's minds.

Justice is a word that resides in the dictionary. It occasionally makes its escape, but is promptly caught and put back where it belongs.

Bombs fall and wipe out civilization as we know it, two things come up out of the ashes: roaches and F-150s.

It's uncomfortable, definitely, but it's also really, really great to talk drums with kids and hear them get excited about music and talk about listening to the drums.

Whatsoever God takes away from His children, He either replaces it with a much greater favor or else gives strength to bear it.

It is when Pirates count their booty that they become mere thieves.