The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Nothing is more painful than the loneliness of being with someone who is never completely there.

Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films.

As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.

God didn't produce a ready-made world. The Creator has done something cleverer than this, making a world able to make itself.

Whatever else may divide us, Europe is our common home; a common fate has linked us through the centuries, and it continues to link us today.

Adversity will surface in every life. How we meet it makes the difference.

I always thought if I photographed anyone or anything enough, I would never lose the person, I would never lose the memory, I would never lose the place. But the pictures show me how much I've lost.

Republicans support opening the floodgates to special interest money and suppressing the right to vote. It's just plain wrong.

How dear to this heart are the scenes of my childhood, When fond recollection presents them to view.

Coal-black is better than another hue In that it scorns to bear another hue; For all the water in the ocean Can never turn the swan's black legs to white, Although she lave them hourly in the flood.