The sky seemed abruptly to have had enough of my dithering and dramatically lightened up around the glowing moon, which retreated like an aging sovereign before the rising sun.

Everything was insanely alive, now you see it, now you don't. I thought, it's the light, it's the water, it's changing every second, it's always doing this whether I'm here to witness it or not.

Between the beach and the big breaking waves about a quarter mile off was a stretch of bumpy, glistening reef, its usual blanket of water pulled back by a celestial hand.

I was always observing. Even while talking, living, going through every motion, I was watching myself and the situation. That's a writer. Always observing.

The surest way to hurt yourself is to give up on love, just because it didn’twork out the first time.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

If a man aspires to a righteous life, his first act of abstinence if from injury to animals.

Authority without wisdom is like a heavy ax without an edge -- fitter to bruise than polish.

Never look a tulip in the eye.

I would like Martin Scorsese to be interested in a female character once in a while, but I don’t know if I’ll live that long.

Friendship is not diminished by distance or time, by imprisonment or war, by suffering or silence. It is in these things that it roots most deeply.

Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.

The subject itself is of no account; what matters is the way it is presented.

As a parent, I don't really want my child to know about all this horrible violence that people seem to be wanting to tell them every time they go to buy some candy.