Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey.

Our brains are like bonsai trees, growing around our private versions of reality.

Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who know where their high school yearbook is and those who do not.

If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner, to call you when they land, you can't afford to be with them.

Unless you are a professional, you will find the tart to be a high-maintenance, unforgiving whistle-blower of a pastry.

I would gladly have accepted a heaping spoonful of nepotism when I got out of college and was looking for a job.

Book tours are such a little tapas meal of where I could live.

No affair that begins with such an orchestrated overture can end on a simple note.

Uniqueness is wasted on youth. Like fine wine or a solid flossing habit, you'll be grateful for it when you're older.

I like to try to do a little work before I do anything in the morning, even if it's a paragraph.

I reckon it’s true what they say that good begets good and bad begets bad. The evil men do lives on after them, but what good they done gets buried with their bones.

Kissing was an extension of that, a celebration. A little party between us, amplifying our naive joy, our faith that the world was delighted to give us just what we wanted.

The cure might be worse than the problem

Right now I'm the most famous silent movie actress in the world and I want to keep that for me. So I hope there's not going to be any other silent movies.

I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind; and it didn't seem to matter.

If we could build an economy that would use things rather than use them up, we could build a future.

Humility is becoming a lost art, but it's not difficult to practice. It means that you realize that others have been involved in your success.

There is such a choice of difficulties that I am myself at a loss how to determine.

Once we realize the extraordinary power we have to compose our lives, well move from passive, conditioned thinking to being co-creators of our fate.

The strength of the claims of formal justice, of obedience to system, clearly depend upon the substantive justice of institutions and the possibilities of their reform.