“And I think belief is one of those things that comes to people in their own way. And just because I believe in something doesn’t mean I think that you should.”

I really don’t like plays or movies that service propaganda.

Life is great-I wouldn’t know what I’d do without it.

I let a tarantula walk across my hand, and I ate rat soup.

Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.

life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; … it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it’s as though you aren’t there.

Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison. On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.

I find myself going to places where I really have no business, speaking to these people in a whole other field that I have no extensive knowledge of. But I do it very often because it scares me.

When does she do all this thinking? We’re together all the time but she thinks deeply about things and with feeling and she can remember the facts. We’ve been married 48 years.

A taste; a painful longing. but the net is always too porous, and we are left with the sweet frustration of almost knowing, which is teasingly pleasurable.

Here’s my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they’re fair with you.

If you know what you’re looking for, that’s all you’ll get – what’s previously known. But when you’re open to what’s possible, you get something new – that’s creativity.

I have thought about punching people out. Sometimes, I’ve thought, ‘Why don’t I just act on that impulse?’ But then, I’ve never hit anybody in anger. Hey! I’ve never hit anybody for fun.

I can sing in tune now, but I have to work really hard on it to make sure that I don’t exercise one of my great talents, which is the ability to sing in three keys at the same time.

I had never really wanted to be famous. Everyone is supposed to want to be rich and famous, but as a boy I never knew what rich was, and the first view I had of famous made me leery.

When people are laughing, they’re generally not killing one another.

And I want to warn everyone in the press and all the voters out there: if you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians, you are just begging to be lied to.

We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart – the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me,

The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

Guys like Josh Gordon need to stay in his sport and mind his own business.

I’m not the king in my own house. I have to wash the dishes and take out the trash and say, ‘Yes, baby.’ I’m 6-foot-5, but I kind of walk around hunched over.

People spending more of their own money on routine health care would make the system more competitive and transparent and restore the confidence between the patients and the doctors without government rationing.

In my own personal life, God plays a great role in the risk, because I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything.

I think I became my own stylist by not knowing any better.