What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.

I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.

Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.

There is always room for at least two truths.

You cannot read any image of the World Trade Center without thinking of 9/11.

I told him that I loved him and that I'd always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.

Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.