The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you.

When someone that you love dies..it's like fireworks suddenly burning out in the sky and everything going black.

People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.

There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature.

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.

That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.

With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of Art, I don't see much else that can nurture human life.

When tea becomes ritual, it takes place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.

Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.

Political corruption, social greed, and Americanized quasi-socialism can ruin even the most wonderful places. California proved that.

Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.

To be able to stand out and be respected by many, you have to be positively unique and full of substance.

You are not responsible for the reader, you're only responsible for what you are writing.

I don't compromise my principles for politics.

A great need a mother has to know that her daughters will find somebody or will be okay in life. That's very primal as they get older. You know, you should get married, you should have children.

The idea of recognizing your strengths and using them in as versatile a way as you can is cool to me.

Despite all the boosterish talk of globalization breaking down barriers, most writers in Anglo-America are still working within the nationalist assumptions of their traditionally powerful societies.

Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.

Every true, eternal problem is an equally true, eternal fault; every answer an atonement, every realisation an improvement.