In both the art and the business worlds, the difference between the amateurs and the professionals is simple: The professionals know they're winging it. The amateurs pretend they're not.

When we really see each other, we want to help each other.

Collecting the dots. Then connecting them. And then sharing the connections with those around you. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing.

Asking for help with shame says: You have the power over me. Asking with condescension says: I have the power over you. But asking for help with gratitude says: We have the power to help each other.

I don't think of myself as particularly cursed or blessed. I think I got dealt a set of cards, and I'm playing with them, sometimes in heels, sometimes in combat boots.

When you're afraid of someone's judgment, you can't connect with them. You're too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.

Art is food for the soul, and an artistic climate is a healthy climate because it breeds empathy.

I crave intimacy to the same burning degree that I detest commitment.

I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is how do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, how do we let people pay for music?

The world needs actual excitement and emotion more than it needs cool people.

When you trust people to help you, they often do.

Life in this village is like that of a louse hanging on to a wrinkle in a loincloth.

One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not to be done at all.

Liberality is not giving much, but giving wisely.

You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.

Inherited wealth may be something easily squandered, but inherited poverty is a legacy almost impossible to lose.

Chastity is a virtue with some, but with many it is almost a vice.

I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression.

I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.

The wretched hasten to hear of their own miseries.

As my friend said that when people say the church is full of hypocrites, he says we always have room for more.