You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles.

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.

Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger.

By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.

A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.

There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.

The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.

Smiley tears and teary smiles are priceless.

We're all in this together. Choose love.

I see myself as 38, but you don't notice it.

I never made any money off of my records. It gave me the name across the country so that I could do some of the things in my personal appearances.

If you believe you can only go so far, it is an obstacle.

The ways of love are strange and hard: The love you want is always barred; The love you have you want to change. The ways of love are hard and strange.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.

The only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing . But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that's where you are. For now.