Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.

Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.

Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.

I embrace emerging experience, I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.

There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.

You don't need many words if you already know what you're talking about

Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.

Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.

...What you fear will not go away; it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.

A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.

I study men like I study books: I skim their midsections.

Every man in the world is better than some one else. And not as good as some one else.

There was a lot of creative energy that I had, that I feel wasn't understood, and I think that whole world for me felt like another family, another place where I could feel heard.

There was nothing separate about her days. Like drops on the window-pane, they ran together and trickled away.

I believe that it is imperative that we learn from the mistakes.

Yeah, Under The Table And Dreaming shaped the way that I think about writing songs.

You should know how great things were before you. Even so, they're better still today. I can't think of who I was before you ruined everything in the nicest way.

I love Frances McDormand so much. I love her career. And I think it's fun because she gets to do comedy as well as drama.

In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.

A writer does not own words any more than a painter owns colors. So lets dispense with this originality fetish… Look, listen and transcribe and forget about being original.