The only reason I wanted 'Making Toast' as the title is that it is a simple gesture of moving on. Every morning there's the bread and you make the toast and you start the day.

Do not keep company with people who speak of careers. Not only are such people uninteresting in themselves; they also have no interest in anything interesting. . . . Keep company with people who are interested in the world outside themselves. The one who never asks you what you are working on; who never inquires as to the success of your latest project; who never uses the word career as a noun -- he is your friend.

Children love to be alone because alone is where they know themselves, and where they dream.

Friends are lights in winter; the older the friend, the brighter the light.

Uncle Scrooge preferred to let the poor die "and decrease the surplus population." Scrooge may not have had God on his side, but his arithmetic was impeccable.

Death is too much for men to bear, whereas women, who are practiced in bearing the deaths of men before their own and who are alsopracticed in bearing life, take death almost in stride. They go to meet death--that is, they attempt suicide--twice as often as men, though men are more "successful" because they use surer weapons, like guns.

The best in art and life comes from a center - something urgent and powerful, an idea or emotion that insists on its being. From that insistence, a shape emerges and creates its structure out of passion. If you begin with a structure, you have to make up the passion, and that's very hard to do.