Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.

If you fake the funk, your nose will grow.

If I had a Volkswagon Beetle. I'd paint the front to resemble Glenn Langdon in War Of The Colossal Beast. Why? Two words: The Ladies.

You might be a redneck if your vehicle has a two-tone paint job - primer red and primer gray.

I know the action in the street is excitin' But Jesus, between all the bleedin’ ‘n fightin’ I’ve been readin’ ‘n writin’.

One cannot inherit a talent for the violin - there are no violins in nature. Instead, one must be motivated, able to benefit from practice, and persevering.

Once you've been doing anything for twenty-five years people start to notice you.

Why is it that we remember with difficulty and without difficulty forget? Learn with difficulty and without difficulty remain ignorant?

Many people never reach greater because they don't leave good enough behind.

Franchises and chains have come to dominate small communities, but those same chains have eliminated a lot of the greasy spoons, places you didn't want to eat in the first place.