“There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.”

The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.

To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.

The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love and great courage. How can you create a character without live and the struggle that goes with love?

She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.

It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.

There is so much truth in children and so little self-consciousness. It always strikes me that they are so capable of losing and finding themselves and also losing and finding those things they feel close to.

You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

I got to wear blinders all the time so I won’t think sideways or in the past.

Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry.

A writer soon discovers he has no single identity but lives the lives of all the people he creates and his weathers are independent of the actual day around him.

How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?

After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead.

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 just think that, unfortunately, the president-elect [Donald Trump] has chosen to address every issue.

And I think we`ve got to hold his feet to the fire to all those issues as well as all the issues that you addressed.

We owe an historic debt to American Indians. They have a unique set of concerns that haven’t been addressed and I’d like to stand with them. Also, I’d like to get their views on immigration.

Armed with nothing more than a Facebook user’s phone number and home address.

Anyone with an Internet connection and a few dollars can obtain personal information they should never have access to, including a user’s date of birth, e-mail address, or estimated income.

My job is not done. I address my songs now to the third world. I am popular all over Asia and Africa and the Middle East, not to speak of South Africa, where I’m trying to go to see Nelson Mandela.

Any honest conversation about engaging young people must address discrimination against young people.

The guidelines say all the right things, … They address all the issues that were raised as problems at the Air Force Academy.