I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

I have forgiven Sonora. I have forgiven New York, forsaken the recursion of history. But I do not yet know how to forgive myself.

Her action in defending Marcão meant one thing to him and something quite different to her

Know that your soul can do whatever you want it to do, because you're not your body

Surround yourself with everything and everyone that will help you feel your best, think your best, do your best, and be your best.

Nothing is ever a setback. If anything, it just motivates you for what's next.

The music of your youth stays with you throughout your life.

I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it.

People will clap to be nice. They will not laugh to be nice.

One thing you might want to learn before you attend the world's largest ukulele lesson is how to say ukulele.

You don't question where the music comes from, because it all comes from God.