“What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.”

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.” – Mrs. Brown

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.

Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.

The happiest people are the ones with the most community.

She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.

Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.

If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.

That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.

We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he’s entitled to joy rather than submission?

I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.

I didn’t even write the lyrics down. I got in the booth, I put down a little guitar riff and the idea I had was it was going to be really simple, I just want it to be all about the lyrics and I just literally sang the lyrics.

The beauty of periodic rebalancing is that it forces you to base your investing decisions on a simple, objective standard.

Donald Trump himself has an idiosyncratic speaking style that relies on simple words and phrases, which worked for him in the primaries but may be coming up short for him now.

The two chief things that give a man reputation in counsel, are the opinion of his honesty, and the opinion of his wisdom; the authority of those two will persuade.

Free markets. What does this system mean? The answer is simple: it is the market economy, it is the system in which the cooperation of individuals in the social division of labor is achieved by the market.

I had two projects that fell apart during preproduction. The first one was this movie that Judd Apatow and I had written about two guys following the Rolling Stones. It was going to be half concert film, half pseudo-documentary.

Most actors are drawn towards historical tellings because it’s one of the most simple forms of storytelling.

When you audition for shows in Hollywood, you go in, you do your scene, maybe you get an adjustment. It’s sort of easy, and a lot of times it just feels sort of rote and simple.