I was a good student, sort of funny and athletic. I had friends.

Writing is not a genteel profession. It's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.

I've rarely met a miserable, self-pitying blind person.

The heart of their [Walsingham Witnesses] religion seemed to lie in disproving the religion of others.

I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you.

Sight is a slick and overbearing autocrat, trumpeting its prodigal knowledge and perceptions so forcefully that it drowns out the other, subtler senses.

Aversion toward the blind exists for the same reason that most prejudices exist: lack of knowledge. Ignorance is a powerful generator of fear. And fear slides easily into aggression and contempt.

Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.

For, like the wind, the sun, or the flowing river, like a soaring man-of-war or a beetle under a stone, like a spider at a web or a crab scuttling sideways across a shore, Nimrod was free.

Beautiful thoughts precede a beautiful life.

During the Cold War, we gathered information by listening to the Soviets, taking pictures of the Soviets, and we allowed our human intelligence to decline.

History never really says goodbye. History says, 'See you later.'

I never met another man I'd rather be. And even if that's a delusion, it's a lucky one.

My goal is to make everybody skilled enough to be able to be their own doctor, their own nutritionist. Because all of us intrinsically have that inside of us.

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

I love Tennessee, but they don't have the pine trees and the sandy soil and the black water that I grew up around.

Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school.