I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

It is a frightening thing to love someone you know the world rejects.

The cool part about naming your kid is you don’t have to add six numbers to make sure the name is available.

Life had not taught me to distrust ministers, but it had taught me to trust no one more than dogs.

I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business , after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations .

Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science -- the dream is over.

I fight myself. I don't fight to break Ali's record or Sugar Ray Robinson's record. I fight to please myself. I know in my heart where I'm rated. I didn't fight in Ali's era. This is my era.

A teacher is not someone you need perpetually. You need them to show you how to get through the doorway; but once you get through the doorway, you are on your own.

When you're young, you don't know what you don't know, so it's easier to get into that magical thing.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter

They're not your words, but you're reciting the lines.