You have to hold your audience in writing to the very end-much more than in talking, when people have to be polite and listen to you.

Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.

Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself.

I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don't listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all - which is so important, too - to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force...When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.

If only I had a wife!" I used to think, "who could stay home and keep the children happy, why I could support six of them. A cinch.

If I did not wear torn pants, orthopedic shoes, frantic disheveled hair, that is to say, if I did not tone down my beauty, people would go mad. Married men would run amuck.

Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.