Well, we tell our kids things like 'don't gossip' and then an hour later they hear us on the phone. Stuff like that.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

A finished person is a boring person.

There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life ... Your entire life ... Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.

Your birth filled your parents with joy, your universe with love, and your soul with the flowers of hope. May those flowers of hope bloom with the fragrance of endless success.

The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.

We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.

Every really new idea looks crazy at first.

When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

No enterprise, small or large, public or private, can remain self-governing, let alone successful, so deeply in hock to others as we are about to be.

My father is a great grandfather. He's a wonderful grandfather, but he's a terrible husband.

Everything Michael Jackson does on stage is exactly right.

Those are terrible people who don't like Glenn Gould... I will have nothing to do with such people, they are dangerous people.