When I'm falling, my girlfriends are my soft landing.

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.

Every day I grow in the wisdom that my soul is vibrationally connected to the Universe.

Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.

We must reach out our hand in friendship and dignity both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy.

The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically , expresses an aspiration for order .

The mother-in-laws themselves weren't natural jokes but most comedians used to use that.

I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini.

And I think one way or another it's evident to those who work with me that as a writer, a director, a friend, as somebody's there that's very anxious to get the movie made.

Piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

How do you restart something that had never been turned off?

I so connected to symbolically being able to turn lead into gold. My grandmother used to say, "Life give you a lemon, you go ahead and make lemonade." To me, that's alchemy.