I got sick when I was 19, and I'd been a really healthy 19-year-old, so I don't have a lot to compare it to. Does it feel like the pain after you give birth? I don't know

This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind.

People think I must have been turning cartwheels on the night I sealed the movie deal - which was only two days after sealing the book deal - but I was really quite terrified.

I think authors can get into trouble viewing the subject matter as their turf

It's easy to talk to a horse if you understand his language. Horses stay the same from the day they are born until the day they die. They are only changed by the way people treat them.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.

For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

Without dignity, identity is erased.

I just thought I was empty and now I'm being filled...and I just wanted to keep being filled.

His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.

You can not have empty or neutral mind, as long as you work the mind will contain dreams, if you stop working it will contain regrets.

Dialogue with the self is the source of all insight and insight is the only thing that can change your life.

Trust God in the dark until the light returns.

The comedy gods are smiling on me tonight.

I'm very disappointed in my country right now, because I think we've kind of lost our moral compass.

It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.

There's something so glorious in giving control to the world. I think that's what I'm trying to do in my films-control the world but also let it be chaotic, let there be life.

It takes two seconds to tell the truth and it costs nothing. A lie takes time and it costs everything.

And yet, something inside you is so horrible or you're such a coward or whatever the reason that you decide that you have to end it. Robin Williams, at 63, did that today.

Writing was not my medium. I preferred to do video.