If you're going to have a book full of clever people and nobody ever jokes, it's just not going to ring true to the reader. That said, humor writing is the hardest kind of writing there is.

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

I have, of course, been called many other things. Most of them uncouth, although very few were unearned

The world is a mess and I just need to rule it.

Half of seeming clever is keeping your mouth shut at the right times.

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

It was wise enough to know itself, and brave enough to be itself, and wild enough to change itself while somehow staying altogether true.

If I seem to wander, if I seem to stray, remember that true stories seldom take the straightest way

There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.

Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath.

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write .

I take the opportunity each day offers.

Curiosity is the hair of our habit tending to stand on end. It rarely happens that our attention is not stained in greater or lesser degree by this animal element.

I realised one day that men are emotional cripples. We cant express ourselves emotionally, we can only do it with anger and humour. Emotional stability and expression comes from women.

For us women, to be German meant, and still means, always to be strong.

How could you even dream or think something of someone who is as uncommercial as I am?

I'm a supporter of embryonic stem cell research. I do think there are very important moral and also religious questions at stake in the debate over embryonic stem cell research.

I can't figure women out. They put on makeup for three hours. They wear things that make them smaller. Things that make them bigger. Then they meet a man and they want truth.

There is no way to learn to pray but by praying.

In art there is no absolute good or bad, but it is absolute that there is good and bad.