You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.

How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.

Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.

The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.

Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.

Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective.

Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

You won’t understand life and death until you’re ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.

Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

We love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and we don't give a damn whether they or we are superior or inferior! They're confounded pretty, and that's all we know and all we need to know!

Writing is not just a job. It helps me to pray. It's a way of being.

Creating a wonderful drama is an art form, while comedy is just entertainment.

I believe in the unconscious state of the mind in death.

Beauty is about perception, not about make-up.

But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.