I was an only child. And it's very much my temperament. I remember playing with a piece of string in my room for hours. I had never thought about what it would be like to have siblings.

Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy-and time. The more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you'll start feeling those minute-and-a-half happinesses.

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

There are still things out there in the universe to contemplate and spend our lives chasing.

I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.

If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.

I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.

Creativity is magic in the making.

So it is necessary that we should learn to be alone.

I describe in 'Chimpanzee Politics' how the alpha male needs broad support to reach the top spot. He needs some close allies and he needs many group members to be on his side.

False modesty is the refinement of vanity. It is a lie.

But nonviolence was never for the oppressor; it was for the oppressed.

A Rod: An attractively painted length of fiberglass that keeps an angler from ever getting too close to a fish.

I always separate myself from reviews, but tweets and Instagram comments, they go directly to my phone. It's hard to keep up.

I heard that your brain stops growing when you start doing drugs. Let's see, I guess that makes me 19.

Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.

The beautiful image today means nothing. It's worthshit. In fact, it's almost as if it has the opposite effect, becauseyou're just like everything else out there.