People say you cant teach writing, but I think thats nonsense.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

Another thread snaps loose from my heart, the pain precise and acute. I embrace it, because it reminds me I'm still here. I'm alive. I'm empowered.

Life and death played out before my very eyes. You don't see these things if you clean your room regularly.

When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

I would rather teach one man to pray than ten men to preach.

My favourite city is Moscow, because of its history, which I find fascinating. As I learned to speak Russian, it made it even more interesting.

Scientific achievements seem evanescent, because the very progress of science causes their supersedure; yet some of them are of so fundamental a nature that they are immortal in a deeper way.

The only way not to be afraid is to join with other people who are also afraid.

When I forgive other people, I let them go, I free them from my ignorance. And as soon as I do, I feel lighter, brighter and better.

I don't think there are answers. I think there are thoughts.

African-Americans are being disproportionately affected by, you know, the kind of misuse and abuse of power.