The flaw is the thing we love.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.

Old dogs can be a regal sight. Their exuberance settles over the years into a seasoned nobility, their routines become as locked into yours as the quietest and kindest of marriages.

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.

memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain.

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.

The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.

the territory of grief ... is both cruel and commonplace.

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.

December 21, 2012 represents a unique opportunity for renaissance, renewal and reinvention that people have waited for for centuries.

Though one were fair as roses His beauty clouds and closes.

If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.

There is nothing as easy as being inspired.

Exercise the writing muscle every day.

When I first started my own brand, when I needed an icon, I had no other icon but myself. I had to create that.

My ambition was to be a record producer, and I had started doing that in the late '60s with my work with the MC5 and my friend Livingston Taylor.

To defend his purity, Saint Francis of Assisi rolled in the snow, Saint Benedict threw himself into a thorn bush, and Saint Bernard plunged into an icy pond... You - what have you done?

The situation now is not easy. But I believe in the good sense of the Japanese people.

To love life through our labor is to be intimate with life's inmost secrets.