There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.

Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy-and time. The more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you'll start feeling those minute-and-a-half happinesses.

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

There are still things out there in the universe to contemplate and spend our lives chasing.

I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.

If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.

My mom was a social worker. I had a pretty good idea of what the authorities can do when a parent's not around.

Nothing looked the same, and everything looked the same.

Everything that has been wrestled from doubtI welcome-the mouths that burst open afterlong knowledge of what it is to be mute.

The whole world seemed to be wounded, broken, hurting.

On the road to equality there is no better place for blacks to detour around American values than in forgoing its example in the treatment of its women and the organization of its family.

One is also reminded of how, in art, the tortoise so often overtakes the hare.

Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion. It is only a dead, too often, indeed, a hypocriticalmoralizing which inveighs against the form of passion as such.

If I'm having a fancy glass of champagne, I'll always mix it with the champagne of beers. Because I deserve all the champagnes.

I don't usually like talking about acting or what my process is, and all those kinds of things, because I don't necessarily think it's helpful to talk about how I do my job.

Confronted with a choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.

For women who turn to welfare, Big Brother becomes Husband.