The best thing we can bring to any fight is a calm and compassionate mind.

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.

It's a big world, and I really like it.

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, EVERYTHING.

Where once we aspired to be more like our heroes, today we try to make our heroes more like us.

What do they teach them at these schools?

My biggest icon is Liz Taylor because I don’t think she had great taste but I loved her energy.

A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.

A President is neither prince nor pope, and I don't seek a window on men's souls. In fact, I yearn for a greater tolerance, an easy-goingness about each other's attitudes and way of life.

Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

What peace can we hope to find elsewhere if we have none within us

Baby bye Here's a fly, Let us watch him. you and I, How he crawls Up the walls Yet he never falls.