The internet kind of feels like happiness sometimes, however. It feels like stimulation.

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.

Life is an opportunity to love and serve.

I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

I love getting out of my comfort zone.

I don't care if a man's theory for tomorrow is correct, I care if his spirit of today is correct.

Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second-nature in a married man.

It seems that the inevitable fate of man is never attain complete freedom: princes everywhere tend to despotism and the people to servitude.

We have an economic policy that is just about 10,000 years out of date.

In two cases I did not fulfill my role as defense minister, in that I did not stop things that I was sure should have been stopped.

I write in Times New Roman, 12 point, and arrange the margins so that the screen looks like a page from a book. This spurs me on to make the writing as perfect as I can make it.

An Icelandic mayor goes on an anti-elf rant which gets him in trouble.