“Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.”

Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.

Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.

A disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

As we age we have not only to readdress earlier developmental crises but also somehow to find the way to three affirmations that may seem to conflict. … We have to affirm our own life. We have to affirm our own death. And we have to affirm love, both given and received.

Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.

Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.

Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.

Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.

Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.

Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.

Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.

This book gives the reader an insight into the sometimes absurd world of television sports. There is a 31st undeniable truth: Al Bernstein is a truly funny man.

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.

In the deepest night of trouble and sorrow God gives us so much to be thankful for that we need never cease our singing.

Love is the bully on the playground who takes your lunch money and gives you a black eye in return, the arsonist who burns your house down with you in it, the witch who lures you into her home with candy and boils you alive for dinner.

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.

My work in books, films and talks lies almost wholly with children, and I have very little time to give to grown-ups.

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Years wrinkle the skin. Giving up wrinkles the soul.