So many things that seemed crucial and excruciatingly hard ended and then didn't matter anymore, forever after

We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

Often, I think, displaced people imagine themselves leading double lives. So a portion of my identity has always been privately siphoned into what would have been if I had stayed in Wisconsin.

Once upon a time, my mother lived in the posh downtown of Homs, Syria. She described my grandfather as a king in a storybook, atop a horse, wearing a didashah and pointing a long arm.

Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don't know that, don't know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.

Casebook is my attempt at a love story. I had a vision of a difficult love.

Keep questioning! With time, you will find answers to your questions.

We are all qualified to fellowship with God no matter our situation or condition

Self-confidence is not a fixed way of being. People are not born with certain levels of self-confidence, it can be acquired, and it can be lost.

It's not business to consumer, it's not business to business, it's people to people

People get nervous accessorising, but there is nothing wrong with adding a belt or a pair of shoes in another colour.

The Devil is in the details, but so is salvation.

I realize how desperate it sounds for me, as a comedian, to ask you to laugh at my jokes.

One of the things I have come up against time and again in my career is the notion that because a book is easy to read it was somehow easy to write.

Nice guys do not finish last. Last place is for the cowards and those too full of fear to take action.

Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.