Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.

We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

You can criticize yourself to a point to do something better, or you criticize yourself to a point where you inhibit yourself.

Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.

It takes a while. It's gonna take you a while. It's normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

Where there is competition, one cannot attain (true) 'Knowledge'.

Rather than pound or a national mind that he believed had been closed by his critics, John Quincy Adams decided to seek a place in the is the esteem of future generations.

At some point we must stop editing everyone else' story and start writing our own.

I like to think Duke Ellington would probably embrace a fragrance as well.

I feel vulnerable in a good way. When I talk about my family, I usually have happy tears.

If there is one general law of communication it is that we never communicate as effectively as we think we do.

We're electrical items and when we die the electricity goes somewhere else. When we die our energy goes into the galaxy.

How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!

Animals are also the ones that are guarding the graves, and they are the ones who communicate between the dead and the alive.

We are more successfully healed by the vis medicatrix naturae (healing power of nature) than by the most ingenious medical application.