When the beer is gone, so are they -- flexing their cars on up the boulevard.

Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.

We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.

Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don't get all writerly: 'He opened the door.' There, it's open.

They say the smart dog obeys but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.

Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.

Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.

In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.

if it's true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive.

I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.

I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.

He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.

The thing I always wanted to say is that surviving abuse sucks. But it's also a choose-your-own-adventure story.

I wrapped a towel around me and I opened the door, and then I splish, splash, I jumped back in the bath. Well, how was I to know there was a party going on?

The problem is that every time people have deviated from the Disney playbook in hand-drawn animation, they've done so with staff that are nowhere near Disney-level talent or Disney-level budgets.

Behold the life at ease; it drifts, The sharpened life commands its course.

The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.

It is at the heart of our human enterprise, that is to say, at the heart of society, to allow consensus a power it ought not to have.

A good listener is not someone with nothing to say. A good listener is a good talker with a sore throat.

Fidel Castro looked after the poor, he looked after the weak, he looked after the widow, he looked after the orphan - he did all the things that Prophet Muhammad did from the spiritual perspective.

Right now, my career is in three directions: as a performer, as an arranger, as an author - and I don't give any one of them true precedent, or true top marks, as opposed to the other two.