“Love is one of the hardest words to say and one of the easiest to hear.”

I’m an old-fashioned guy. I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch, looking at a lake or something.

Trips to the dentist-I like to postpone that kind of thing.

Laugh as much as you breathe and love as long as you live.

One day the people that didn’t believe in you will tell everyone how they met you.

It’s awful bad luck to bring a woman aboard the ship. It’s awful worse luck not to.

Keep moving forward and do what you have to do for you.

Once you get on the ship, everything is fine. Once you get on land, everything is not so fine.

If someone were to harm my family or a friend or somebody I love, I would eat them. I might end up in jail for 500 years, but I would eat them.

Attention is a strange sort of being, anyway, the idea of attention if someone appreciates your work. It’s always nice that someone appreciates your work.

I like the challenge of trying different things and wondering whether it’s going to work or whether I’m going to fall flat on my face.

Growing old is unavoidable, but never growing up is possible. I believe you can retain certain things from your childhood if you protect them – certain traits, certain places where you don’t let the world go.

I was angry and frustrated until I started my own family and my first child was born. Until then I didn’t really appreciate life the way I should have, but fortunately I woke up.

I’m interested in the things people try to hide.

And it hurts so much to want something you can’t have.

I always felt like I was meant to have been born in another era, another time.

School’s a weird thing. I’m not sure it works.

It is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.

Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.

Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.

I was surprised, as always, be how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.

I know what I want and it gets in my way. I know I’m not easy.

One of the sweet things about pain and sorrow is that they show us how well we are loved, how much kindness there is in the world, and how easily we can make others happy in the same way when they need help and sympathy.