Go to foreign countries and you will get to know the good things one possesses at home.

I would wear the blue overalls of the fieldworker and often wore round, rimless glasses known as Mazzawati teaglasses. I had a car, and I wore a chauffeur’s cap with my overalls. The pose of chauffeur was convenient because I could travel under the pretext of driving my master’s car.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

Southeast Asia has a real grip on me. From the very first time I went there, it was a fulfillment of my childhood fantasies of the way travel should be.

Sevier County is a great area.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn’t possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

You can’t have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.

It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.

I always tell people that if I move anywhere it would be Toronto.

I really don’t pay attention to the outside world when I’m incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside of jail, because it’s all beyond my control.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

I don’t want to get into it, but if you know someone, it doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say or they do.

Everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground.

We’re introducing separate rooms with double beds in all of our planes so people can actually go with their partner and have a proper night’s sleep.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

Is everything funny? For me, yes. There’s a positive to every negative. Even my divorce? For me, yes. If you go back and look at it, why it happened or how it happened, there’s something in there that’ll make you laugh.

Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

I think, in politics, half the people are gonna like you, and half the people are not gonna like you, no matter what you do or what you say… It’s like there are no right answers. If there were, everyone would choose the right answers. They’re all opinions.

Because in a split second, it’s gone.

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.

The worst way of flying, I think, is standby. It never works. That’s why they call it standby. You end up standing there going, ‚Bye!‘

People from all over the world come to London wanting to make their own mark on it, and they add to the energy and vitality of the capital. It’s got a bit busier since the ’60s, but the more the merrier!

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

I love travelling full stop – so while I’ve had some harrowing instances, I never look at them negatively. Memories are made when you’re travelling – not when you’re chained to your desk.

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

Just got back from a pleasure trip: I took my mother-in-law to the airport.

Back in Oakland, we have a lot of food in the locker room, but on the road, it’s mostly just fruit. So we have to prepare differently. But really, once you get to the gym, everything on the road is pretty much the same.

I have nothing to ask but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.

I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad and to travel for it too!

When I’m doing a book tour in the States, I’ll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don’t know where I am right away. I’ll go to the window, and it doesn’t help there either, especially if you’re in an anonymous strip and it’s the usual Victoria’s Secret, Gap, Chili’s, Applebee’s.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

I like being comfortable at airports, in flip-flops with no jewelry on.

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

Sometimes the greatest meals on vacations are the ones you find when Plan A falls through.

Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.