Not having enough talent seemed almost worse than not having any, because having a little meant having just enough to know what you lacked

Becoming hurts.

Perhaps the only happily ever after is to survive to tell the story

This is what happens, when things are not quite a fairy tale.You go into the woods to find your story. If you are brave, if you are fortunate, you walk out of them to find your life.

This is the thing about fairy tales: You have to live through them, before you get to happily ever after. That ever after has to be earned, and not everyone makes it that far.

Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs.

Extreme boredom provides its own antidote.

You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.

Insofar as we may at all claim that slavery has been abolished today, we owe its abolition to the practical consequences of science

Forth in thy name,O Lord, I go, My daily labour to pursue. Thee, only thee, resolved to know, In all I think or speak or do.

In Europe they're more calm, more reserved. Here, in the States, people are more wild, a little more open. I guess it takes a lot to impress those people up there in Europe. Especially in London.

I don't always see my movies right away. And there are some I haven't seen at all. Sometimes that bothers the directors, so I'm obliged to see them.

Rather than being taught to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others’ versions of ourselves.

A nonviolent man cannot desire embarrassment.

It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.