We have been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures within and to find them automatically in the outer world of our environment.

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.

Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential self.

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

Lawsuit abuse is a major contributor to the increased costs of healthcare, goods and services to consumers.

Drumming is the simplest thing that we can do to bring us together.

The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people.

As I listened, it occurred to me that interest in and affection for the animals that share the planet with us may be a more unifying force than any other.

Whenever you are alone, remind yourself that God has sent everyone else away so that there is only you and Him.

If you get a little kitty and he's down on the bottom, and he's laying on his chest, you know tucked up underneath, then that cat is not relaxed.

I definitely have a family. I have a boyfriend who has kids, and we do normal things every day, like get up and go to school. Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Even if a story has nothing to do with my life, if I can recognise something of myself in the character and think, 'Oh yeah, that's what I'd do...' yeah, that's what I look for.

There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hope soon to be swept away.