If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

It's what you do that makes your soul.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Maybe, peace was preferable to pleasure. Maybe, peace is one’s first love.

Not being happy really is my fear.

What made me empathic was my depressions.

As a creative person, you want to start with a blank canvas.

There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession.

Falling in love is the beginning of all wisdom, all sympathy, all compassion, all art, all religion; and in it's larger sense is the one thing in life worth doing.

In winter, I plot and plan. In spring, I move.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.

My business is to succeed, and I’m good at it. I create my Iliad by my actions, create it day by day.