“If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.”

One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.

When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.

The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.

When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

Someone asked me…how it felt and I was reminded of a story that a fellow-townsman of ours used to tell–Abraham Lincoln.

I’ve never really felt that I’ve had the right hair cut, or had the right clothes.

When I was younger, I felt like I could say anything and it was funny.

You kind of have to learn how to adapt yourself, and I felt a really powerful way to do that was to make people laugh.

Shaq is Shaq. I did an episode of The Soup with Shaq, and he shook my hand, and I felt like I was a Ken doll, like I had no hand.

I’ve never really felt good at the parties, but I have enough friends now that I feel social, I used to feel very antisocial, but I think the theater helps.

I’ve always felt a little misrepresented in the world.

Smoke Signals really mirrored the way I grew up and how I felt, and that movie was the first time I’d dealt with my parents’ death and how I felt that loss and sadness and anger.