I don't believe in that country any longer. I'm not interested. I'm writing in the language, and I like the language.

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.

Worry is the antithesis of trust. You simply cannot do both. They are mutually exclusive.

It takes two to bribe.

Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors.

Don't let who you were talk you out of who you are becoming.

Nothing in the world is so rare as a person one can always put up with.

Why go for a costly, sickly, mass-produced purebred when shelters are full of one-of-a-kind mixed breeds who are literally dying for a home?

Each of us was born to fulfill a divine purpose. As we open our hearts and minds to a new way of being, the purpose of our lives unfolds organically.

Somehow, I don't think Jesus came to Earth to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

Conservative Republicans are back. We're in the fight for fiscal discipline and limited government, and we are on the side of the American people.

My feelings about my mortality are less selfish than they used to be. I used to affect a cavalier attitude to death; now I see it from my son's perspective.