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.

Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather.

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

I am not suited to the role of going around selling the life-can-be-beautiful idea. It can be, indeed. But you don't buy the concept from your friendly door-to-door lecture salesman.

When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.

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

I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.