Every life has a file, if you will.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

If you are still tied to your past, the devil will keep using it as a weapon against you

The world and everyone in it is always ready to blame a man for anything when he is already knocked down.

I had lots of opportunities to survive this [popularity] madness. Madame de Staël said, "Glory is the bright mourning of happiness."

I do write a lot of children's songs, and I'm going to do a children's television show, which also means I'll be doing a lot of albums. So I do hope my future will hold a lot of things for children.

...there are few things deader than a dead brown trout stream.

The saving grace of the cinema is that with patience, and a little love, we may arrive at that wonderfully complex creature which is called man.

There's a difference between using the word to insult somebody and using it to start a journalistic conversation.

I grew up knowing I could have had a million different lives. It makes your life mysterious and your imagination go wild.

Will we ever reach a point when it is no longer necessary to say Them and Us? I believe we must reach that point, or perish.

It easeth some, though none it ever cured, to think their dolour others have endured.