“Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.”

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.

Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.

The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?

If you have never had success, then nobody knows how it is, but in Liverpool, everybody knows how it was.

This morning when I put on my underwear I could hear the fruit-of-the-loom guys laughing at me.

Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.

My whole family are hams. They’re storytellers and everyone outdoes the next one.

Everyone has said I got my own sound.

We have a big appetite for putting people down but, at the heart of everyone, there’s enough room for all of us to succeed.

I grew up listening to everybody.

To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.