But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.

your soul is an inner something that is another you and hardly anybody knows what it's really thinkin' except you.

I write in the novel's afterword that our recent wars "finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy".

The key is that I control my life; my life doesn't control me.

I believe that no matter what happens, or where we go, or if there's an afterlife, that we'll always be connected. Not even death can make me forget you, or forget that I love you.

The zeitgeist is for cutting spending and balancing the budget. But I do not want the Republican Party to be perceived as putting the budget ahead of people, jobs and education.

Knowledge is nothing without action. Nothing changes until you do something. What you do will directly determine what you learn.

Half of all marriages end in divorce- and then there are the really unhappy ones.

Fine. Everybody wears seatbelts. No radio. No distractions.” Ben shot Hi a stern look. “No running commentary.” “Your loss,” Hi said. “To the pimp ride!

Simon Gray, I decided when I first witnessed this frog into prince transformation, did not have a drinking problem. He had a drinking solution.