If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Engaging solely to validate your opinion takes away from the character building process.

Like swimming squirrels, you navigate with the help of Heaven and a stiff breeze, but you never land where you hope to—do you?

The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go. but what they take is usually what they need least and what they let go is what they need most.

Men are not free when they're doing just what they like. Men are only free when they're doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.

If there's an energy between two people it doesn't matter what you look like or what you do for a living or where you live.

There is a significant Latin proverb; to wit: Who will guard the guards?

I wish I had stayed and finished my career here in New York.

A lot of women in the summer nowadays are just a bunch of stuffed shorts.

If I'm out shopping and someone talks to me, I get startled, as I'm not a natural celebrity.