What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

It's what you do that makes your soul.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Authors are but the instrument to be played. The art is inside them, but many people help create it.

I didn't have all the answers, but at least I had a goal. Revenge. Who cared if it would eat me up inside and leave me hollow?

The institution of delegated power implies that there is a portion of virtue and honor among mankind which may be a reasonable foundation of confidence.

I speak for those children who cannot speak for themselves, children who have absolutely nothing but their courage and their smiles, their wits and their dreams.

You don't have to be religious to have a soul; everybody has one. You don't have to be religious to perfect your soul; I have found saintliness in avowed atheists.

[Invading Iraq] would create generations that hated the USA.

My voice is still for war.

Our first single, 'Ticket To Ride', was a kind of half-hit, half flop: in some places it was number one, in others it was ash-tray material.

I was a rebel and I wanted to do something that nobody else did, and nobody else played the cello. Also, I was also a small kid and I liked the fact that it was big.

Who pleases one against his will.