“All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.”

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Shouting has never made me understand anything.

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing – not just a waiting.

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.

Art is a form of consciousness.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Do you know, it’s funny, but I never thought of being blind as a disadvantage, and I never thought of being black as a disadvantage.

Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.

The difference between a tool and a machine is not capable of very precise distinction; nor is it necessary, in a popular explanation of those terms, to limit very strictly their acceptation.

When you finally accept that it’s OK not to have answers and it’s OK not to be perfect, you realize that feeling confused is a normal part of what it is to be a human being.

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

If life isn’t about human beings and living in harmony, then I don’t know what it’s about.

I agree that faith is essential to success in life, but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death.

Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.