Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.

Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my "real" writing.

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

Let nothing human be foreign to me

Everything that has ever happened to me is still all with me.

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.

Country ham is baked whole, usually with a glaze, sometimes studded with cloves, and served as the centerpiece of Christmas and Easter feasts.

If a lion turned every time small dogs barked at it, it would be the laughing stock of the jungle.

Inventions are not solely the making of material things, inventions are also the mental unleashing of ideas by a genuis with a sixth sense.

Son, if you were any farther from fine you'd be in Nebraska.

It would be very heard, for example, a basketball owner, no matter how racist he was, to try to operate without Blacks. It would be suicidal.

The values of Islam are expressed by Muslims clearly. September 11 changed the world, and put Muslims on the spotlight.

A tune's like a staircase - walk up on it.

All suffering goes just as it came. So it is with the glories and tragedies of the world.

Women know when they've got the menopause but men don't quite know. They know it afterwards.

Courage is the discovery that you may not win, and trying when you know you can lose.

I think the guiding principle for me is working with people, because I don't know how long it's going to last, I want to seize the moment and work with people I want to work with.