...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.

Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.

A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things.

That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn't do school anymore. Something inside wouldn't let me.

Let’s just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone.

You shouldn't turn on C-SPAN to get your sports update.

I always remembered that when I saw people get married they got on a rocketship and went to Planet Happiness, Population: Them.

I just love the delusional, hallucinatory qualities of sleep deprivation. I can't get enough of it.

I was offered a free villa in Hollywood, but I said no thank you, I prefer to live in Italy.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

The anti-elitist values in America, I think, are very destructive to education.

Faith is not a commodity that you either have or don't have enough of, or the right kind of. It's an ongoing process. The opposite of faith is despair.

I've never sung a single song in my whole life on purpose to shock anyone. My 'hot numbers' are all, if you will notice, written about something that is real in the lives of millions of people.

Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.

What's tough is being good every day.