I'm always nice when I do drugs. But, you know, I'm nicer on the drug called "writing."

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.

It's a big world, and I really like it.

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, EVERYTHING.

Dreams alone with no acts toward achieving them are useless: no dreams at all is a condition of the pathetic.

I feel more, hence I speak less!

[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.

The man in the coon skin cap in the pig pen wants eleven dollar bills, you've only got ten.

If somebody doesn't have enough judgment to be able to look at plastic surgery and realize how phony it is, then they can't be helped.

Statistics has been the handmaid of science, and has poured a flood of light upon the dark questions of famine and pestilence, ignorance and crime, disease and death.

Westerners have aggressive problem-solving minds; Africans experience people.

Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such, We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much; Who, born for the Universe, narrowed his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.

The real harvest of life is the outworking of the internal. If there's nothing in there, there's nothing to work out.