Indecision is a virus that can run through an army and destroy its will to win or even to survive.

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

I really don't know what makes a comedian. I think it's a family background and environment. Yet if you put the same ingredients in another person, he may never utter a funny line.

You get the software you pay for. In every sense. To the nth degree. That's the way the world works.

Fear is an acid which is pumped into one's atmosphere. It causes mental, moral and spiritual asphyxiation, and sometimes death; death to energy and all growth.

A joyous occasion is never quite as wonderful as when it becomes a memory.

As you may know, previously as Attorney General and now as Governor, I have supported legislation to close the gun show loophole in North Carolina.

That is one of the characteristics of fascism, the idea that the state can provide all of the answers for everyone.

Obama has been the single worst president in modern American history in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

As life speeds by, nostalgia has a shorter pregnancy. Games still in progress are given the straight-to-sepia status of "Instant Classics" no matter how oxymoronic that phrase appears.

Golf is like solitaire. When you cheat, you cheat only yourself.

Even though poetry was written for the 'minds ear' as well as the physical ear, the minds ear can be trained only by the other ... which comes back to reading poetry aloud.