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.

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.

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.

Man…who lives in three places – in the past, in the present, and in the future – can be unhappy if one of these three is worthless. Religion has even added a fourth – eternity.

Need to get to Ruislip by sparrow-fart though', said the squadron leader. 'Think you can do that? Can I come along for the ride?

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Some times I think this whole world Is one big prison yeard Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards

I want to direct, produce, and write, learning as I go.

He who bets on governments and government money bets against 6,000 years of recorded human history.

The problem [ of the twenty-two million Afro-Americans] is so broad that it's going to take the inner working of all organizations.

A good portrait is incredibly hard to create, there is too much temptation to pander to the individual rather than portray them as they really were

Most of my nightmares involve me forgetting my lines in a stage play.