Until that moment she had not really noticed him. Now she felt as though she'd stubbed her toe on a rock, and looked down to find that it was part of a buried city.

The hermit Anthony once told me that a monk is like a fish: take him out of his element and he dies. Silence is his element. In silence you can trade this shoddy world for Heaven.

When you were young, and your heart, was an open book. You used to say, live and let live.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

A child can identify with adult characters- but only if they are sympathetically drawn and simple enough.

Life is a series of avoiding horrible situations until ultimately you're dead. That's how I feel about things.

It has been said that idleness is the parent of mischief, which is very true; but mischief itself is merely an attempt to escape from the dreary vacuum of idleness.

A nation's domestic and foreign policies and actions should be derived from the same standards of ethics, honesty and morality which are characteristic of the individual citizens of the nation.

My goal is to make everyone and anyone a fan.

I really just can't watch myself. I see all the machinery at work and it just drives me nuts.

Simple pleasures are the last healthy refuge in a complex world.

Artists probably should have some impenetrable aspects of themselves.