There is much to be said for solitude.

The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.

Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

We all talk about how much we hate lies. Yet we prefer, so often, to be lied to....because it allows us to dodge all those painful truths we'd rather not hear.

Success is a very fragile veneer. I get wary of people who embrace celebrity. It ruins people.

Words matter, words have import.

I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.

All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren't they?

I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

No matter what's happening in the Middle East - the Arab Spring, et cetera, the economic challenges, high rates of unemployment - the emotional, critical issue is always the Israeli-Palestinian one.

We've been so disconnected agriculturally and culturally from food. We spend more time on dieting than on cooking.

If human values were relative, all laws-whether those based on revealed religions or those devised by man-would become meaningless.

Gratitude will make a man do incredible things.

Try not to confuse longevity with a job well done.

You can be guaranteed a story on the presidential campaign is gonna lampoon the Republican candidate in every one of those news agencies.

Ninety percent of the people in any group are nice, raised to be polite, and have more in common than not.

In Italy, there are so many significant architectural structures in history such as the Pantheon in Rome, or the Duomo.

Corgis are enchanted. You need only to see them in the moonlight to know this.