It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

A finished person is a boring person.

There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life ... Your entire life ... Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.

It is a fact: Of all the people we ever know in our lifetime, the only thing we have in common with them is a handful of shared experiences.

The chandelier's teardrop crystals twinkled above them like stars. It was easy to imagine that they were miles away from London, and that only the two of them existed.

When mountain-climbing is made too easy, the spiritual effect the mountain exercises vanishes into the air.

We don't need more to be thankful for, we just need to be more thankful.

The bottom billion people don't contribute at all to climate change - maybe 1 percent of emissions, they could double or triple their emissions and the climate would not be destabilised.

Anything that makes you feel good is always going to be drawing in more.

[About being a teenager] Like, at first it's fine and you think you have a dark side - it's exciting - and then you realise the dark side wins every time.

The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion-the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt-both with the common motion and with their own.

Writing is the toughest thing I've ever done.

What troubles me is not that movie stars run for office, but that they find it easy to get elected. It should be difficult. It should be difficult for millionaires, too.