If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

You can be too big for God to use, but you can never be too small for God to use.

You learn history in school, and you have a reverential feeling toward it. But by being irreverent, it feels current.

Jeb Bush has being slammed by his own party for a very messy response to questions about his brother's war in Iraq. He should have been ready for this one.

Half the time I don't know what I'm trying to say.

Tell him to go to hell.

I admire President Obama's ability to trust strangers.

Ah, that tastes nice. Thank you.

We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.

Music is life. Music defines peoples' experience on this planet.

Distance makes everything beautiful.