We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.

We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

You can criticize yourself to a point to do something better, or you criticize yourself to a point where you inhibit yourself.

Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

It takes a while. It's gonna take you a while. It's normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

I cannot stress enough that the answer to a lot of your life's questions is often in someone else's face. Try putting your iPhones down every once in a while and look at people's faces.

Truth is irrelevant

My two most unproductive days of the week have always been yesterday and tomorrow. Keeping that in mind, I try to focus majority of my attention on today.

Sometimes there is no comfort, only the knowledge that the worst has happened

The trouble with a kitten is that eventually it becomes a cat.

Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority and its own enlightenment.

When you're an orthodox worrier, some days are worse than others.

If they would only do as he did and publish posthumously we should all be saved a lot of trouble.

I don't get on stage and give a social diatribe. I am a performer and an entertainer.

Producing is hell, writing is frustrating, acting is really satisfying, directing is heaven.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.