If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy-and time. The more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you'll start feeling those minute-and-a-half happinesses.

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

There are still things out there in the universe to contemplate and spend our lives chasing.

I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.

I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.

My mom was a social worker. I had a pretty good idea of what the authorities can do when a parent's not around.

A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

This bill is the legislative equivalent of crack. It yields a short-term high but does long-term damage to the system and it's expensive to boot.

Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans.

And I think to myself what a wonderful world. Oh, yeah.

After theology I give to music the highest place and the greatest honor.

The vast majority of organizations today have more than enough intelligence, experience and knowledge to be successful. What they lack is organizational health.

I'll tell you what I probably would prefer to happen less and less: actors that I know and respect in shampoo ads. Or modeling.

Swear it on your life. (Zephyra) That I can never do. (Stryker) Why can’t you? (Zephyra) Because you are my life, and I can’t live another day without you. (Stryker)

There's so many singers, you watch them and a lot of it is waving around. You don't get this feeling that they're really thinking about what they're saying.

The greatest philosopher of all time was Dirty Harry. And if you remember, Dirty Harry took the words right out of my mouth: "A good man needs to know his limitations."