Learning when 'enough is enough' is the discipline of a lifetime.

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.

One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are.

The characters that I create are parts of myself and I send them on little missions to find out what I don’t know yet.

Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.

Some things arrive in their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.

Negative people present us with an accelereted personal growth opportunity.

The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can't congeal: There is a forward motion to yearning.

The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.

The act of longing for something will always be more intense than the requiting of it.

Life is a disease.

Stress level: extreme. It's like she was a jar with the lid screwed on too tight, and inside the jar were pickles, angry pickles, and they were fermenting, and about to explode.

On the last morning of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea.

Opportunities are like sunrises. If you wait too long, you miss them.

Positive anything is better than negative nothing.

I cannot get into cottage cheese, and I've tried a lot. Yogurt is hard for me to eat, too. I have to hold my nose to get it down. There's something wrong with that.

A lot of people are always striving for bigger and better. People are always wondering if the grass is greener and then they'll​ start hearing things or meeting other people.

The fish cannot leave the deep waters. The state's weaponry should not be displayed.

One thing about playing the real jazz is that you can't count it.

I have tremendous confidence in the capacity of the poor to transform not only their own lives but also to build a just, humane, and democratic society.