“That's what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call "personality", or maybe even "pain".”

“We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvar...”

“Here is the solution to the American drug problem suggested a couple years back by the wife of our President: "Just say no.”

“Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn't," I said."So everybody alive must have the Survivor's Syndrome. It's that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me prou...”

“The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesnt have to be a...”

“Painters--and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong some...”

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging...”

“She didn't belong anywhere and she never really belonged to anyone. And everyone else belonged somewhere and to someone. People thought she was too wonderful. But she only wanted to belong to someo...”

“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and se...”

“Education doesnt make you happy. Nor does freedom. We dont become happy just because were free if we are. Or because weve been educated if we have. But because education may be the means by which...”

“Because I trust in the ever-changing climate of the heart. (At least, today I feel that way.) I think it is necessary to have many experiences for the sake of feeling something; for the sake of bei...”

“The past has no power over the present moment.”

“work at our responsibility as parents as if everything in life counted on it, because in fact everything in life does count on it.”

“Happiness [is] only real when shared”

“That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.”