If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Memory changes as a person matures.

Words make you think. Music makes you feel. A song makes you feel a thought.

How my emotions starred as I played! During one of this tug-of-war contest between knowing right and doing wrong, I wrote the words to a song on my own for the first time.

It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.

I'm always looking for challenges.

It appeared to me obvious that the happiness of mankind should be the aim of all action, and I discovered to my surprise that there were those who thought otherwise.

It won't be a normal life-I know that. But it will be a life. A life together.

I know not what tomorrow will bring.

The non-doing of any evil, the performance of what's skillful, the cleansing of one's own mind: this is the teaching of the Awakened.

I grew up on 'Lawrence' and 'Zhivago'. A legacy with not one but multiple timeless classics.

If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.