No human being can control love, and no one is to blame either for feeling it or for losing it. What alone degrades a woman is falsehood.

Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.

The cigar is the perfect complement to an elegant lifestyle.

We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.

Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.

Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.

It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

You may impose silence upon me, but you can not prevent me from thinking.

Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.

The intellect seeks, the heart finds.

My new story collection won’t please everyone, nor was it meant to. Then again, not everybody lives in my world. If they did, I’d have to move out and find another world to write about.

She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling.

Religious creeds encourage some of the craziest kinds of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and favor severe manifestations of neurosis, borderline personality states, and sometimes even psychosis.

I've come to the realization that a lot of our problems are because of a dearth of spiritual values.

Encore' was an experiment. 'Encore' was the second chance at a first impression. 'Encore' was not completely planned.

It's cool that people like what I do, but I don't work for the audience.

I think good entertainment makes you feel something... it can be a variety of different feelings.

What Kierkegaard said about love is also true of creativity: every person must start at the beginning.

Singers, musicians, and songwriters don't want to use the word "acting" because we want it to be more real than that - we want it to come from us: naturally, truly, really.

I do a number of things working on human rights issues, prison recidivism rates, and then I also push and have worked a lot on the social issues of rebuilding the family.