“Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it’s going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.”

There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

Now, see, that’s why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy…the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.

A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.

In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career – my anti-job – that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.

I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.

You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.

I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same

The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.

I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

At first, the only thing that I learned was to save. Then I learned about mutual fund, then later on direct stock investments. I also went into small businesses and even real estate.

The real wealth in Krishna Consciousness is Humility. We don’t have to become a big devotee rather we have to become a Humble Devotee.

I was lucky. My grandmother stepped up for me and said she would take responsibility for me and a compassionate juvenile judge took a chance and gave me one.

Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world….

As I’ve said, basketball has been, I think, a real cooperative venture. There have been a lot of people that have been involved in it: coaches, administrators – not recently – fans and nobody, nobody any more so than students over the years.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

This is their real life – texting about trivial things; listening to numbing music on their private headphones. The machines block everything out – you create your own little trivial world.

Every time you look at a house in Los Angeles, the real-estate agent will tell you that someone famous once lived there. It always seemed irrelevant to me: Does a property gain value just because Alfred Hitchcock used to eat breakfast there?