Academic achievement was something I'd always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.

The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.

Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.

I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.

Desires collide; the wish to eat bumping up against the wish to be thin, the desire to indulge conflicting with the injunction to restrain. Small wonder food makes a woman nervous.

Make it the ultimate purpose of your life to be a great success.

A thought which is created in a second can change the thousand years of the World!

I am not myself.My thoughts are tangled in words that are not my own.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

When it comes to war, we focus more on the mainstream coverage of the event, rather than the event itself. People dying is never funny. Protest puppets are always funny.

Victory often goes to the army that makes the least mistakes, not the most brilliant plans.

How about those Olympics, ladies and gentlemen. Didn't London look like the place to be? New York City was in the running for this Olympics. But here's what happened. We got outbribed.

I still think Ned Beatty should've played Don Corleone.

My grandfather invented the cold air balloon... But it never really took off.

I don't even think my voice is really good.