“The hardest thing you will ever do is trust yourself.”

It would be nice to feel that we are a better world, a world of more compassion and a world of more humanity, and to believe in the basic goodness of man.

No one could ad lib like Peter. You would think that it was all scripted, he was so poetic, but it wasn’t.

New York is a galaxy of adventure at once elegant, exciting and bizarre. It’s a city that moves so fast, it takes energy just to stand still.

Don’t confuse being stimulating with being blunt.

Success can make you go one of two ways. It can make you a prima donna – or it can smooth the edges, take away the insecurities, let the nice things come out.

If you were a tree, what kind would you be?

Life sometimes brings enormous difficulties and challenges that seem just too hard to bear. But bear them you can, and bear them you will, and your life can have a purpose.

Small children do not belong at an adult party, and especially should not be used like trained midgets to help serve martinis.

Show me someone who never gossips, and I’ll show you someone who isn’t interested in people.

[On being indecisive and changeable:] On my gravestone I want inscribed: ‘On the other hand, maybe I should have lived.

Homogeneity is much to be admired – in milk, for instance – but not for parties.

A good laugh makes any interview, or any conversation, so much better.

If it’s a woman it’s caustic, if it’s a man it’s authority, If it’s a woman it’s too pushy, if it’s a man it’s aggressive in the best sense of the word.

A conversation isn’t a competition.

This is what I tell, especially young women, fight the big fights. Don’t fight the little fight… Be the first one in, be the last one out. Do your homework, choose your battles. Don’t whine, and don’t be the one who complains about everything. Fight the big fight.

Most old people … are disheartened to be living in the ailing house of their bodies, to be limited physically and economically, to feel an encumbrance to others – guests who didn’t have the good manners to leave when the party was over.

But when the dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.

To use a metaphor drawn from glass, it may be revealing for us to re-focus.

I’m drawn to characters who bear similarities to the protagonists in myths and legends.

Dawn was written well before 9/11. People speak a lot today about the banality of evil, but not all evil is banal.

Blood is drawn! I am impressed-though my hell-spawned powers will heal it!

An opportunity to honor the legacy of the lives drawn into the lines in my face, the broad of my nose.

If you give yourself this gift of not knowing and you follow it, a vast spaciousness and mysterious openness dawns within you.

More than any previous time, people are drawn to meditation, to mindfulness, to yoga. These have become mainstream in the West because there is a hunger.