“Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”

There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

Art is always an energy exchange.

It’s horrible getting older. I mean, it’s wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it’s horrible losing your looks.

There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship, only backward.

Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.

The camera creates a magical transformation. It’s not enough to exist; we must chronicle that existence. …

A new dog never replaces an old dog; it merely expands the heart. If you have loved many dogs, your heart is very big.

Photographs are the most curious indicators of reality.

Fame means millions of people have the wrong idea of who you are.

It’s easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless.

If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.

Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don’t feel any experience is complete unless it’s recorded.

The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton’s first law of jealousy.

You are always naked when you start writing; you are always as if you had never written anything before; you are always a beginner.

The trick is not how much pain you feel – but how much joy you feel

Why does life need evidence of life?

And I’ve discovered a strikingly consistent pattern: grit and age go hand in hand. Sixty-somethings tend to be grittier, on average, than fifty-somethings, who are in turn grittier than forty-somethings, and so on.

I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?

She is one of God’s women fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth.

How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go?

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.

People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable.

Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at hand confer on one the responsibility to do it?

When you’re just an actor, you do your role, and then you’re in your trailer. It’s not as hands on as when you’re directing. You live and breathe it.