Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Trouble seemed to follow me around. The late Tim Russert, my friend and the esteemed moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, once joked, “Richard, just don’t come to Washington.

I'm active in PAX, which is a gun awareness organization. We treat gun safety as a public health issue.

The appeal of the wild for me is its unpredictability. You have to develop an awareness, react fast, be resourceful and come up with a plan and act on it.

It is wonderful how God works by our hands, and yet His own hand does it all.

I think every group of black guys should have at least one white guy in it.

I did not know that we had ever quarreled.

One cannot start a new life, you can only continue the old one.

The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.

If I was on an island, just for melody, I would take albums by the Stones, AC/DC and the Beach Boys' Smiley Smile.

There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go.