“Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.”

The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith, Scott. I don’t think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.

Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.

We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]

Tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.

You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

You hit road blocks in life, but I’m living proof that you can overcome those road blocks and become what you want to become.

The idea is not to block every shot. The idea is to make your opponent believe that you might block every shot.

The world that you can go walk outside and walk around the block. That’s reality. The reality that’s being talked about is something else entirely.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

You don’t play characters that are celebrities – you play guys who know what to do when their septic tank’s blocked.

… I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of “writer’s block”.

To obstruct this is to block God’s purposes in and through his people.

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.