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

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

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

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.

Our happiest times are those in which we forget ourselves, usually in being kind to someone else. That tiny moment of self-abdication is an act of true humility: the man who loses himself finds himself and finds his happiness.

If you treat people right they will treat you right… ninety percent of the time.

Sometimes it takes only one act of kindness and caring to change a person’s life.

Grant me the grace to dissolve my negative thoughts about myself today. I breathe the grace of kindness into my heart. And may the grace of healing flow abundantly to every one in need of help.

God is even kinder than you think.

Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.

All of the words in her head keep her from being lonely but they aren’t always kind.

These stones In her pockets, the dime of her – compassion.