My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.

Pack is for comfort when you hurt, I thought, putting my head back down. And for the first time in a long time, maybe the first time ever, I appreciated being a part of one.

The trick is to be grateful when your mood is high and graceful when it is low.

When the soul looks out of its body, it should see only beauty in its path. These are the sights we must hold in mind, in order to move to a higher place.

Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced.

One of my great all-time loves in cinema, and I've seen it three times, is Bondarchuk's 'War and Peace.' Not a lot of people may have seen that film. It was made during the Soviet era.

I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

There is no book of mine that I reject. That does not mean that I find them good.

I got to fall in love. I got to win a war. I got to write words that inspired a nation.

Part of our job as human beings is to share our knowledge and share the things we've learned. So we can either save people from making the same mistakes, or give them hope.

Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.