Nobody knew how to be what they were right.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

You will never know loneliness when you have a dog, when you lose that dog it will be loneliness like you've never known.

Much later I realized that a person's attitude to pain reveals more about his future than almost any other sign I know.

You can't just live in a comfortable little suburban neighborhood and get your education from movies and television and have any perspective on life.

Guys ask me, 'Why are you always smiling?' Are you kidding? I'm in the NFL, that's why!

I'll get there, if I leave everything but my bones behind," said Sam. "And I'll carry Mr. Frodo up myself, if it breaks my back and heart.

New Yorkers are either the nicest or the rudest.

If I'm a criminal, and I'm confronted with a 7-foot tall cop and an albino cop, I'm gonna be so lost, I'm spilling my guts.

Much of spirituality today is an effort to change God to suit us. But he's not going to become more like us, we need to become more like him.

Every day, it's important to ask and answer these questions: "What's good in my life?" and "What needs to be done?"

I'm not saying I hate Jews, I'm just saying that I think they shouldn't be alive any more.