I have spent a lot of my life trying to do good and be a humanitarian, to write about difficult places, and to tell the story of oppressed peoples.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.

We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.

A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.

Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people; there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them.

There are just traces of me and not a shadow left…Without the traces of your iridescence to make my silhouette.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

I've been on the road since 1983. Nothing ever changed, even when I was doing TV and movies.

Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.

The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms

Hope is not just... out in the sky, or not accepting the facts or reality. Hope is having optimistic, positive expectations.

I am a hip-hop fanatic, and rock fanatic.

I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.

[To a woman whose cellphone rang during a formal meeting:] You'd better answer that. It could be someone important.

Real happiness is not dependent on external things.