“Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost.”

Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.

I’ve spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.

Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!

True love stories never have endings.

Get this in mind early: We never grow up.

I want to be very close to someone I respect and admire and have somebody who feels the same way about me.

If it’s never our fault, we can’t take responsibility for it. If we can’t take responsibility for it, we’ll always be its victim.

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.

Learning is finding out what you already know.

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.

The simplest things are often the truest.

There’s a spirit in anything, I think, into which we weave our soul. Not many pilots talk about it, but they think about it in the quiet dark of a night flight.

To bring anything into your life, imagine that it’s already there.

Allow the world to live as it chooses, and allow yourself to live as you choose.

Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.

Love is the effort and desire to make someone else everything they were created to be.

You can feel when something’s authentic, and you can feel when it’s not: you know when someone’s trying to make the club record, or trying to make the girl record, or trying to make the thug record. It’s none of that. It’s just my emotions.

In my experience, the hardest thing about having someone “come out” to you is the “pretending to be surprised” part.

They say that when you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes. They never tell you that when you watch someone you once loved dying, hovering between this life and the next, it’s twice as painful, because you’re reliving two lives that traveled one road together.

Jobless people will have no self-confidence. And they feel they are worthless because when you don’t have a job you have to rely on someone.

If you are feeling helpless, help someone.

To me, when someone wrongs you, you both share the burden of that wrongdoing—the pain of it weighs on both of you. Forgiveness, then, means choosing to bear the full weight all by yourself.

So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.