I haven't really written my plays and books - I've heard them. The stories are there already, singing in your genes and in your blood.

There is such solace in the mere sight of water. It clothes us delicately in its blowing salt and scent, gossamer items that medicate the poor soul

Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.

That is because at the close of the day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.

After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.

The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.

It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.

It is very difficult to be a hero without an audience, although, in a sense, we are each the hero of a peculiar, half-ruined film called our life.

A beard on a man is only a way of hiding something, his face of course, but also the inner matters, like a hedge around a secret garden, or a cover over a bird cage.

And whatever my life had been up to that day, it was another life after that. And that is the gospel truth.

For I did not want him to see, or to question me, for here contains already secrets, and my secrets are my fortune and my sanity.

A wise person is the one who knows what he knows and what he does not know.

Books are all the dreams we would most like to have and like dreams they have the power to change consciousness.

[Y]ou, one day, will knock lips with Turkish-coffee-clad veils whose beds our kin must tuck in misty-eyed.

He told me that when we first met, he had said to a friend about me: “If I get that girl’s number I will never ask another girl for her number again.

My voice dropped when I was 14. And when I was 14, I might have weighed 75 pounds. So you can imagine how strange that must have been: like James Earl Jones speaking through a sock puppet.

Unexpected kindness is the most powerful, least costly, and most underrated agent of human change. Kindness that catches us by surprise brings out the best in our natures.

I was the law and order.

I do think sometimes when scrolling through the TV and there's something on and I look at it and I think oh, my god. I thought I was fat? What is my problem?

Heaven's ebon vault Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world.

With acting, I get to escape into this character and embody it. With music it's like, "Hey guys, this is my diary, here's all my feelings."