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

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.

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.

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know.

If you never assume the truth, you'll never be shackled by a lie.

A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.

It's just cool to be involved in something that's that big and joyous and meant to make people feel happy.

I think acting is a mixture of instinct, imagination and inventiveness. All you can learn as an actor is basic technique.

You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

We have been subject to globalization and financialization and austerity and workers have been thrown under the bus while the one percent is rolling in dough.

To be granted some kind of usable talent and to be able to use it to the fullest extent of which you are capable - this, to me, is a kind of joy that is almost unequaled.

Do one thing at a Time, and while doing it put your whole Soul into it to the exclusion of all else.