I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.

We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

You can criticize yourself to a point to do something better, or you criticize yourself to a point where you inhibit yourself.

Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.

It takes a while. It's gonna take you a while. It's normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

Millions of beauties and splendors are waiting for you. You go on moving around and around, never entering into the temple of life. The door is the heart.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing slowly... very slowly.

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?

I think if you had a capital-gains system where the long, patient capital would actually be rewarded, nanosecond capital turning would not be.

As you treat your body, so your house, your domestics, your enemies, your friends - Dress is a table of your contents.

Something will break very bad.

For life, good youth, hath never an illWhich hope cannot scatter, and faith cannot kill;And stubborn realities never shall bindThe free-spreading wings of a cheerful mind.

Prayer is the breath of life to our soul; holiness is impossible without it

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.