You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

A real diamond is never perfect.

What's closest to your heart is what you talk about, and if God is close to your heart, you'll talk about Him.

At least eighty percent of millionaires are self-made. That is, they started with nothing but ambition and energy, the same way most of us start.

You have to take the hits as they come and you have to take the opportunities.

It's really hard to separate fantasy from reality.

I do not think that the radio waves I have discovered will have any practical application.

We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalize our own inequities.

... when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?

When you put so much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.

You know, there's times when you should play and there's times when you gotta hold back.