A societies needs determines their ethics

Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

There's a place in you that you must keep inviolate. You must keep it pristine. Clean. So that nobody has a right to curse you or treat you badly. Nobody. No mother, father, no wife, no husband, no­­­-nobody. You have to have a place where you say: 'Stop it. Back up. Don't you know I'm a child of God?

The love of the family, the love of one person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.

The best candy shop a child can be left alone in, is the library

I am always talking about the human condition and about American society in particular: what it is like to be human, what makes us weep, what makes us fall and stumble and somehow rise and go on from darkness into darkness and that darkness carpeted.