I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

His voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street.

To feel alone is to be alone.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy.

Sometimes you like to keep stuff bottled up, but that is not the best policy.

The good characters in my book are loosely based on folks I know. All the bad stuff is made up.

They do horrible, unchildish things because they they have had very horrible, unchildish lives.

Nobody minded what you did in bed or what you said about God, a very civilized attitude in 1948.

Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

One of the mistakes the Germans made ... was that they were not brave enough to be afraid.

So, to prepare for the role, I had to take music lessons, talk to wives who had husbands overseas, and carefully study the reactions and mannerisms of a friend who was expecting.

My parents instilled a very strong work ethic in me from a young age, fortunately.

The right things to do are those that keep our violence in abeyance; the wrong things are those that bring it to the fore.