An adequate share of humor and laughter represents an essential part of the diet of the healthy person.

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.

Respect for the fragility and importance of an individual life is still the mark of an educated man.

Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations.

Laughter is inner jogging.

If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality.

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.

Drugs are not always necessary. Belief in recovery always is.

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.

Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?

Thou art a very ragged Wart.

Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

My brothers bullied me, so I cried a lot as a kid. It was the only defense I had. Telling them to stop wouldn't work. The crying would bring my dad. Dad was my cavalry.

Good food is a celebration of life, and it seems absurd to me that in celebrating life we should take life. That is why I don't eat flesh. I see no need for killing.

Nature is always lavish of her gifts even to the most insignificant forms. The butterflies and moths are richly dowered in this respect.

Every day women and children are killed and maimed by landmines long after wars are over.

I want to stay close to the groove of people's individual human stories. I can't see that there's anything more interesting than that. That's just me. That's what I do.

I still have this deep-down fear that if I go poking into the bushes I might find a dead body.

Happiness for me is when my kids are good and when my family is whole.

Diversity in literature is, in part, about representation - who is telling the stories and who stories are told about.