It's a long day's drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins - real and imagined - and stitched them onto the sackcloth of his own soul, it is endless.

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.

I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.

This is not a full circle. It's life carrying on. It's the next breath we all take. It's the choice we make to get on with it.

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.

I love my mother so much, because I see the whole of her.

I always knew mum loved me - tough, look-after-yourself love, as if she knew she wouldn't always be there.

I had the constitution of a missionary.

In ways I don't entirely have the words for an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down.

In general, I almost always watch foreign films.

I don't dream of a ceiling fan which is always here spinning above my head. I dream of a cool weather

When you follow your heart you allow miraculous possibilities to unfold.

The best thing is I can say 'I'm working' when I'm having a cup of tea and a cigarette and fiddling on the guitar.

It's definitely the hardest tackle I've taken in my life but I'm still breathing and that's a good sign.

Think as little as possible about yourself and as much as possible about other people.

There's this idea of shifting baselines. It was coined by a guy named Jeremy Jackson. It's the idea that every generation takes what it sees, and says, "Okay, well, that's the norm."

There is, of course, nothing wrong in a program that aims to please everybody, except that as a rule it is a prelude to dictatorship.

During one of my early seminars, there were a bunch of seminar junkies there.

We have a responsibility to promote stem cell research which could lead to treatments and cures for diseases affecting millions of Americans.

The interest in Wisdom is fading. Soon there will not be enough left to support the aphorism, even though it tries to amuse by half-mocking the Wisdom it propounds.