I love to be surprised or challenged or told that I know less than I thought that I knew. I know it's an old saw, but the older I get the less I know I know.

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.

Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.

We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?

Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.

Again the greatest use of a human was to be useful. Not to consume, not to watch, but to do something for someone else that improved their life, even for a few minutes.

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It's just not my thing anymore.

You are your master. Only you have the master keys to open the inner locks.

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.

I grew up conservative because my mum was a conservative, and when I finally realized what conservatives were, I changed my mind immediately.

Speed is a byproduct of good, slow practice.

Let water wash our bodies clean, and love wash our souls.

I do not sleep; I wish to meet my death awake.

The best kind of politics is when you help people become their own best selves.

If a cow walked into this room, I'd probably walk out. I could milk it, but my dad never forced me to do a lot of chores like that, mostly because he loved doing it himself.

They don't want to feed an ISIS narrative that there is a religious war between Islam and the Christian West, plus genocide is carefully defined under international law.

Monastic incarceration is castration.