One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.

Vatican II was a force that seized the mind of the Roman Catholic Church and carried it across centuries from the 13th to the 20th.

Leaders make things possible. Exceptional leaders make them inevitable.

Handwriting is civilization's casual encephalogram.

A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights.

People travel because it teaches them things they could learn no other way.

Never try to wear a hat that has more character than you do.

As they marched, the crowds lining the route broke into applause, a sweet and deeply felt spontaneous pattering that was a sort of communal embrace. Welcome home.

Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.

Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business.

Everywhere you hang your hat is home. Home is the bright cave under the hat.

Being famous is not all that one should want in life...there is much more to life than name and fame...

No matter how long you behest, to the fruit draped tree. It will do you no best, until a shingle you free.

Oh God, my stomach must have won a medal- it's doing a lap of honour now.

Authors have to help each other out. It isn't a competition

Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.

Tell your girlfriend or wife you love them everyday. Like I do!

You can't ever get everything you want. It is impossible. Luckily, there is another option: You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of the endless cycle of desire and aversion.

Day by day, tiny specks of us float away.

Begin each day with the blueprint of my deepest values FIRMLY in mind then when challenges come, make decisions BASED on those values.

Buy less. Choose well. Make it last. Quality, not quantity. Everybody's buying far too many clothes.