It was psychological trick called empathic listening. You say what the person is feeling so they feel understood.

Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center.

I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater.

...And in freedom, most people find sin.

So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

A taste so profound and complex that it can't even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, tastes like love without the fear of love's dissolution.

My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.

Books, in all their variety, offer the human intellect the means whereby civilization may be carried triumphantly forward.

I've learned the hard way how valuable privacy is. And I've learned that there are a lot of things in your life that really benefit from being private. And relationships are one of them.

There are lots of countries that are having these kinds of internal civil wars in other parts of the world and nobody is talking about intervening.

Someone once told me that the most dynamic actors are people who have stories. People who have lived life. People with experiences.

Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of thing long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.

With software, you really can replicate and do a lot of very real and active development in parallel, and actually try it out and see what works.

People really want to do something good. You just have to show them where it is.

I like to begin every screenplay with a burst of delusional self-confidence. It tends to fade pretty quickly, but for me, at least, there doesn't seem to be any other way to start writing a script.

It makes me angry when people insist that I have a responsibility to do what they think I should do.

we have to suffer mosquitoes the size of blackbirds.