Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.

I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.

Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my "real" writing.

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

Let nothing human be foreign to me

Everything that has ever happened to me is still all with me.

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.

Country ham is baked whole, usually with a glaze, sometimes studded with cloves, and served as the centerpiece of Christmas and Easter feasts.

It flashed as a guiding light whilstDuran was lost in his dreams

Eternity! How know we but we stand On the precipitous and crumbling verge Of Time e'en now, Eternity below?

Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.

Agriculture is in danger. The whole world is in danger. We need to learn to adapt. If we don't, we'll face catastrophic consequence on a scale you cannot imagine.

Life though a short, is a working day. Activity may lead to evil; but inactivity cannot be led to good.

Love does not solely belong to one person. No matter how hard you try, if the feeling is not mutual, it'll be fruitless.

If you must go nowhere, step out.

He is short-sighted who looks only on the path he treads and the wall on which he leans.

The Cul-de-Sac ( French for "dead end" ) ... is a situation where you work and work and work and nothing much changes

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.