My work is writing, but my real work is being.

In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it."

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.

Be grateful for yourself...be thankful.

In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.

The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops.

The factor that made him so powerful was also his greatest liability.

Your reciept is your library card." -- On what killed the brick and mortar bookstores.

Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ASK. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds.

One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.

Whatever role we were in our family of birth, we take on this persona and in your 20s and 30s in particular, you end up thinking that's you and that isn't necessarily you.

The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed, not to control guns, but to control blacks.

It's a good thing we have gravity or else when birds died they'd just stay right up there. Hunters would be all confused.

The earth was made so various, that the mind Of desultory man, studious of change, And pleased with novelty, might be indulged.

True independence is not a gift to be received. It can't be a hand-out to people. It must be an achievement by the people.

Mothers and grandmothers: these are the people that I admire most, not so much chefs.