My dream was one day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

People say: 'Let the facts speak for themselves'

The seed of all impulse is a feeling bursting to express itself in action.

By lunchtime the valley was lightly coated, like a cake with confectioner's sugar...there was white fur on the antlers of the iron deer and on the melancholy boughs of the Norway spruce.

If only people would realize that moral principles are like measles.... They have to be caught. And only the people who've got them can pass on the contagion.

I like the rough impersonality of New York ... Human relations are oiled by jokes, complaints, and confessions-all made with the assumption of never seeing the other person again.

Let's hold hands and brave this beautiful, crazy life together with a sweet smile and a calm breath.

Our greatest natural resources are our hearts and minds, together with those of the people around us.

The hardest thing for a musician to learn is how to play WITH people. That's what made the Basie rhythm section.

Everything in Gatlin was rigged. Why would the carnival games be any different?

Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this.