Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

The tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.

Americans' great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon rather than a civilization.

There is balance in life, but not fairness.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.

Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

In thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality.

Human beings need unhappiness at least as much as they need happiness.

The older the friendship, the stronger the trust.

Regardless of whether you are a man or a woman, everyone births things into reality.

A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out.

The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.

Barack Obama's discovering what a nightmare dealing with hostage problems is - a discovery previously made by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, i don't see a lot of room for change in American policy.

The stars don't have to be perfectly aligned for me to do a good job.

We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it's not just a very sophisticated entertainment, but a way to act.

When you tell your truth, you are coming from a real place, so you are automatically a leader.

I have this whole thing: if you look good, you feel good, and if you feel good, you look good.

On the whole, show business is a hard business in which to be married