Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.

And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have.

Although I know it's unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.

There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.

Better to be furious at one thing, become radiant with purpose. Better to love links and rhythms than all-embracing answers.

I will try to disappoint you better than anyone ever has.

I’ll always deny that I kissed her. I was just whispering into her mouth.

exaggerated sunsets / splashed with rain, odd collisions / of roots, animals, seeds. / I didn't like a thing I saw, / so much effort to be strange.

I make myself up from everything I am, or could be. For many years I was more desire than fact. When I stop becoming, that’s when I worry.

Isn't there a curious elegance in how one moment passes into another?

I've tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.

I've known rivers:I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Who would think it possible to redirect historical scholarship by explaining what Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence?

But now, I get up every morning and go to the gym because I don't like waking up stiff or in pain and wondering if my hip is going to hurt me.

Success is the ability to live your life, the way you want to live it, doing what you enjoy most, surrounded by people you admire and respect.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

The excitement I get from writing is finding out each day what happens next.

Just in the course of an hour, people didn't need to be persuaded. They just needed to hear, oh my god, there is another plan here which is about the public interest.

I think I've always been drawn to the notion of talk as cinematic.

The Impressionists had to fight the gallery system for many years before becoming accepted. One of their methods of fighting was to band together and hold their own shows.

A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.