“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history… Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

Downstream is always someone else’s up.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.

I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.

Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.

It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.

What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.

…our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.

Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.

I’m very lucky to work in so many different arenas of the entertainment industry and I do enjoy them all, but making music – original music – in the studio or live onstage is definitely my favorite thing to do.

I love my kids so much. They teach me something every day. It always brings richness to my work, and even more in life. I feel lucky to be able to do both.

I’ve been lucky, I’ve had movies that made a lot of money, so I don’t feel like I have to kill every time out. I don’t want that pressure. I don’t need it.

I’ve always been lucky enough to have great audiences. It has been quite a life.

I was in the South of France, in Saint-Tropez and I met her when it was totally unexpected.

The books say that it is not so serious to lose time in a closed position; I am lucky, since these comments have not harmed me too much.

By simply doing the reverse and focusing on why you are lucky and grateful things are not worse, you will strengthen and increase your mind’s positive emotions and make yourself happy and even more likely to feel happy in the future.

I guess at it’s very core love is connection that just makes so much sense you wonder how you used to live before you were lucky enough to experience it.