“You know how a river goes on and on? That’s my love for you.”

In high school, my desire for friendship far outweighed my talent for it.

Step out from behind the words. When you’re a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they’re not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

We grow too old to lose old friends.

Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.

Nothing erodes [a mother’s love]. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things-hard as the rock of this earth.

Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.

Words are the weights which hold our history in place.

Nature is not the number-one mystery, I’ve learned. It’s the heart that takes top honors.

I believe friends enclose us, like a pair of parentheses. Each one knows us differently, each sustains us in a different way.

I had to choose: Either leave the country, where it’s become dangerous for me, or go on the offensive.

People have a range of capacities to deal with overwhelming experience.

I don’t ever go on the Internet. I don’t even know how it works.

The more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever.

For aspiring comedians? Don’t listen to me. Just go on stage and do what you think is funny.

When we are confronted by failure and mistakes, we can leave them behind and go on with our lives.

Great lives never go out; they go on.

It takes a lot of time to get experience, and once you have it you ought to go on using it.