I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

I didn’t die young. So I am very lucky. There are other artists and people that didn’t survive certain things… people can imagine that I did the most dangerous, and I did the worst… for many reasons, I shouldn’t be here.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

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.

It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

A lot of people don’t like the road, but it’s as natural to me as breathing.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

I’m more of a realist when it comes to life, and I’d much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

I think any life can be interesting, any surroundings can be interesting. I don’t think I could have been so brave if I had been living in a town, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level.

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

Older people sit down and ask, ‚What is it?‘ but the boy asks, ‚What can I do with it?‘.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

Men freely believe that which they desire.

I’m not somebody that thinks about destiny and fate, but I don’t walk away from it when something unfolds.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.

The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

A lot of us grow up and we grow out of the literal interpretation that we get when we’re children, but we bear the scars all our life. Whether they’re scars of beauty or scars of ugliness, it’s pretty much in the eye of the beholder.

In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in blame.

There are no big problems, there are just a lot of little problems.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

So many people are looking at what’s wrong, and I try to encourage them to look at what’s right in their life. A lot of people have it a lot worse than you do.

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.

In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives… I really try and live the mission of the company and… keep everything else in my life extremely simple.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

Too many people measure how successful they are by how much money they make or the people that they associate with. In my opinion, true success should be measured by how happy you are.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

I’ve been trying to… Having been an English literary graduate, I’ve been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.