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

Sometimes the majority just means all the fools are on the same side.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

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

I’m never in the same place for more than, like, three days at a time. Things can change from one minute to the next.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

I’m not someone who sits at home and doesn’t like to go out, doesn’t like to watch movies. I like to live my life.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.

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.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.

Science is magic that works.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

I love driving my car on any highway.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.

I never go anywhere. I do sketches and make phone calls, and people visit. It’s more fun to come to Paris.

Being young is a great advantage, since we see the world from a new perspective and we are not afraid to make radical changes.

I don’t concern myself with award. I’d been to the party enough times to know it really didn’t matter.

Death is just life’s next big adventure.

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.

People see things differently and remember things differently. It’s why if somebody robs a liquor store and there are four witnesses they’ll often disagree.

A tree’s a tree. How many more do you need to look at?

Youth is wasted on the young.

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.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.

You might not have the things you want, but if you check carefully, you got all you need.

If I see a mountain, I just pick up and hike it.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

When I was younger we had a grape arbor, and my mom would go out and pick grapes and make grape jam in the sink – boil it, put it in jars, and give it away as gifts.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‚why?‘ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‚why not?‘

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

I was kind of secretly hoping one of my kids would go out and make a million bucks. So when they put me in a home, at least I’ll have a window with a view.

I never get too high on my stardom or what I can do.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

Life is our dictionary.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

It could be – and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don’t like it – that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

To understand the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to understand the nature of the prince, one must be of the people.

Oh, yes; you Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.

I think that as you grow up, as you get older, we can’t get bitter, we can’t get jaded.

The label ‚liberal‘ or ‚conservative,‘ any – every time I hear that, I think of the great Gilbert and Sullivan song from ‚Iolanthe.‘ It goes, ‚Every gal and every boy that’s born alive is either a little liberal or else a little conservative.‘ What do those labels mean? It depends on whose ox is being gored.

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.