The city's contradictions and frailties drive me to the church. The church, in turn, binds my wounds and soothes my troubled heart, and sends me right back out into the city again.

Quality, service, cleanliness, and value.

You can't operate a company by fear, because the way to eliminate fear is to avoid criticism. And the way to avoid criticism is to do nothing.

Transcending mind-made limitations doesn't mean you stop being yourself. On the contrary, you become more yourself than ever before.

The best songs are stories, and the best singers storytellers. Great singers can make you care about what they're feeling. You have a sense of knowing them.

It's still relatively rare to have an epidemiologist at a zoo.

Without love, without humor, yoga is just a lot of hard work.

As he thought of it, though, he could not imagine what "just living" might actually be. He had never done it in his life. But he wanted to do it anyway.

It is easy to decide on what is wrong to wear to a party, such as deep-sea diving equipment or a pair of large pillows, but deciding what is right is much trickier.

One of the over-riding things for many who grow up in poverty is the simple desire to escape. I think it was sort of obvious to me that escape had to be through education.

I speak Spanish because I grew up overseas in Spain, Uruguay and Argentina.

I can't help but always be thinking about ideas.

Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

she thought I could find a way to save her soul when she died and became an undead. Right now, I was just looking to find the rent money. I’d get to my roommate’s soul later.

The fun thing about getting older is finding younger people to mentor.

It takes far less energy to move from first-rate performance to excellence than it does to move from incompetence to mediocrity.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.