You'd think that radio was around long enough that someone would have coined a word for staring into space.

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.

We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

You can criticize yourself to a point to do something better, or you criticize yourself to a point where you inhibit yourself.

Great stories happen to those who can tell them.

We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.

It takes a while. It's gonna take you a while. It's normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

I cannot stress enough that the answer to a lot of your life's questions is often in someone else's face. Try putting your iPhones down every once in a while and look at people's faces.

If you add the shadow of death to a moment of passion you are in that instant free of all normal ties, your mind grows still and your body enters a state of non-being.

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.

Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I'm wearing will never really fit.

Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.

I believe with the best of who I am in God, but I sometimes think if anybody would watch me and [they] didn't believe a damn thing, they would have a very hard time deciding which of us is which.

Wal-Mart is going in and slaughtering [small towns] just as we once killed the buffalo.

If factual information upsets you, then you are creating a world that is not embracing objective truths, and that's not how you advance a democracy.

It looked pretty wild, but I was actually in control of myself. I've never really injured anyone throughout my career.

The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.

I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.