If you evade suffering, you also evade the chance of joy.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Summer's lease hath all too short a date.

To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this.

I like to read. I've become obsessed with fiction. And it's too bad: I'm a musician many people love and I myself am not part of the music scene.

The president said that this is not removing a mole. You know, removing a mole, that's an outpatient sort of an operation. This was removing a cancer, removing a cancer takes more time.

From the very beginning Europe has been not only a success story but also a story of success achieved by learning.

Speak, Lord”; make time to listen. Chastening is more than a means of discipline, it is meant to get me to the place of saying, “Speak, Lord.”

When we live our lives authentically, we discover our true place in the world for the first time.

Micro trends matter more than macro ones, but most of all, people matter. Individual human beings with names and wants and interests.

There is no greatness without taking risks.

A major theme in all my books is that the CIA is not only the first line of defense but they should also be the first line of offense.