I'm really not a clothes person. To me, that's just work. It's the thing I hate to do the most. I don't want to be judged in that way.

Part of me longs to do a job where there's not a gray area.

It's an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That's always been a tug of war for me.

I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the stone age.

Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.

Being understood is not the most essential thing in life.

I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.

Love and respect are the most important aspects of parenting, and of all relationships.

Let how you live your life stand for something, no matter how small and incidental it may seem.

Privacy above all else. Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was.

Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

Politics, as a trade, finds most and leaves nearly all dishonest.

It was almost painful, I thought, to have a heart so swollen with gratitude and what must have been pure, untainted happiness. I wanted to live inside the feeling forever.

Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It's their job, to eulogize. I didn't know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss.

The object of convalescence ought to be to turn our attention to life: at other times, simply to our tasks!

Haters are cowards. When confronted they often back down. We must resist haters.

If you want to change something, you have to use new ways.

Maggie Shipstead's prose is so graceful and muscular, so dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless, that at times I had to remind myself to breathe. Astonish Me is a treasure of small surprises.

I write because I'm unhappy. I write because it's a way of fighting unhappiness.

Self-interest is the most ingenious and persuasive of all the agents that deceive our consciences, while by means of it our unhappy and stubborn prejudices operate in their greatest force.