Me, I say too much optimism will get you killed.

For the world is a hard place and nothing comes without a price.

How will I make a people who do not understand the power of belief believe?

Stop your weeping. Grief is for the dead.

A house built on lies has a weak foundation.

She laughed and said not to confuse pride with nobleness.

Does mankind truly hate itself? How can one surmount such irreverence?

You are free. The world is yours. got take it.

If my mom told one more story about how cute I looked in the bathtub when I was three years old I was going to burrow into the snow and freeze myself to death.

I know for me, when I would drink, I circumvented my own self-protection and my own judgment and my own discrimination - the healthy kind of judgment and discrimination.

One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you, or that presents itself.

So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed

Be brief, be buoyant, and be brilliant.

There is this value in books, that they enable us to converse with the dead. There is something in this beyond the mere intrinsic worth of what they have left us.

Yoga is a spectacularly multifaceted phenomenon, and as such is very difficult to define because there are exceptions to every conceivable rule.

I don't think I could stay interested for a couple of months in a character of mean motivation.

I have less control over how I'm cast and the jobs that I get than people would imagine. Most of us don't have control over that, but I think it's a preponderance of your body of work.

[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.