We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing.

Don’t wait for the last judgment – it takes place every day.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It’s because I’m not quite an atheist and it worries me. There’s that little bit that holds on: ‚Well, I’m almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.‘

Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We’ve been so busy damning ourselves for years. We’ve done it all, and yet we don’t take credit for it.

I’m addicted to placebos.

I’m not afraid to look like an idiot.

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.

What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside.

I’ve laid my friends bare.

We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.

I sometimes have a tendency to walk on the dark side.

I change my mind a lot. I usually don’t agree with what I say very much. I’m an awful liar.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, ‚Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.‘

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

If people continue to feel like Democrats are looking after poor folks and Republicans are looking after rich folks and nobody is looking after me, then we don’t get a lot of stuff done. And the trend lines evidence the fact that folks have gotten squeezed. And obviously, 2007, 2008 really ripped open for people how vulnerable they were.

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

As social animals, we are extremely susceptible to the moods of other people. This gives us the power to subtly infuse into people the appropriate mood for influencing them.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

I like to write about love and love lost because I feel like there are so many different subcategories of emotions that you can possibly delve into.

I’m not a god – I do bad things.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.

All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man’s actions.

Love is a serious mental disease.

It’s dangerous to read the Internet about yourself when you’re me. Or when you’re anyone in the public eye.

I don’t think I’m bad for people. If I did think I was bad for people, I would go back to driving a truck, and I really mean this.

The people in my songs are all me.

Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit; your machine can be taken over totally.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

It’s not to much fun to know yourself too well or think you do – everyone needs a little conceit to carry them through & past the falls.

Have you ever asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get married, and before you know where you are, you will be mothers and fathers; and you will then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all that your life is going to be?

I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

The human being is a strange mixture of blind instinct, on one hand, and conscience, on the other.

I think our capacity for wholeheartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be broken-hearted. It means engaging with the world from a place of vulnerability and worthiness.

No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.

Seeing myself on the screen makes me cringe. I understand that I am that way – pouty.

As you think, so shall you become.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulty of my life… I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a vagabond.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

I talk about myself in the third person all the time. I don’t live my life in the way someone like you does. I live my life completely serving only my work and my fans.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

The personal ego already has a strong element of dysfunction, but the collective ego is, frequently, even more dysfunctional, to the point of absolute insanity.

I don’t like to read things that people write about me. I’d rather read what kids have to say about me because it’s not their profession to do that.

Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That’s not a guess, it’s a guarantee. With pride, it’s not a matter of ‚if‘ we will fall, but ‚when.‘ There are no exceptions.

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

All emotion is involuntary when genuine.