If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers.

It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.