Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.

Southerners ask intimate questions in the way monkeys groom each other for lice, not to pry but to make you feel cared for.

Strength just comes in one brand - you. Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed

The only thing more destructive than a tornado is a family.

Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you.

What I still ask for daily-for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.

The sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives.

Cities are the least permanent things in our civilization.

As a child I thought it was very boring when I had to sit with [my mother] on the city streets, but the time sank deep and surfaced later.

Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.

The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats.

Learning without thought is labor lost thought without learning is perilous.

Lose your freedom, and become a slave by borrowing.

The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.

If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways—not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.

I love a bit of drama. That's a bad thing. I can flip really quickly.

I feel much more comfortable as an artist collaborating with others because I feel more mature.

I like the idea of being the funny guy in the dramatic thing, playing a hit man with a weird sense of humor.

Since when does a militarily occupied people have the responsibility for a peace movement?

There are rules you follow here not because you want to, but because you have to.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.