Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast. I'm not talking about onset or duration. I mean the quality of the insanity, the day-to-day business of being nuts.

Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.

The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.

Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.

I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.

I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.

My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.

Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.

An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.

As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.

Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society.

Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.

It is great to be faced with the impossible, for nothing is impossible if one is meant to do it. Wisdom will be given, and strength. When the Lord leads, He always strengthens.

The Free State men, myself among them, took it for granted that Missouri was a slave state.

Summer treads on heels of spring.

Investing a lot of time and money in external beauty and caring little about internal beauty.

A mere literary man is a dull man; a man who is solely a man of business is a selfish man; but when literature and commerce are united, they make a respectable man.

The Japanese, if I understand them, are masters of the unsaid and the unstated, of subtlety and ambiguity, all of which constitute powerful stimulants to the imagination.

In terms of my work with Nike, obviously signing Michael Jordan to a $500,000 contract in 1984 set a new precedent for the business side of the game.

Never trust a journalist.