Sometimes the most beautiful thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned.

I am glad that I do not have any children.

Who promised you that only for joy were you brought to this earth?

Why do we go around acting as though everything was friendship and reliability when basically everything everywhere is full of sudden hate and ugliness?

We are imprisoned in the realm of life, like a sailor on his tiny boat, on an infinite ocean.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

Things are not as we would like them to be. There is only one way to deal with it, namely to try and be all right oneself.

How one can live without being able to judge oneself, criticize what one has accomplished, and still enjoy what one does, is unimaginable to me.

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.

How can one know anything at all about people?

Children usually do not blame themselves for getting lost.

What I have always wanted for myself is much more primitive. It is probably nothing more than the affection of the people with whom I am in contact, and their good opinion of me.

If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that Life.

Sometimes the most beautiful thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned.

Create around one at least a small circle where matters are arranged as one wants them to be.

If I have a stupid day, everything looks wrong to me.

We are aware only of the empty space in the forest, which only yesterday was filled with trees.

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.

It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost.

Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed.

We live trapped, between the churned-up and examined past and a future that waits for our work.

Everything becomes so problematic because of basic faults: from a discontent with myself.

My different personalities leave me in peace now.

Papa always makes it clear that he would like to know me as much more rational and lucid than the girls and women he gets to know during his analytic hours.

Everyone here says in a surprised manner that I have grown... they are so stupid and do not notice that I am standing up straighter!

I am no longer afraid to say anything.

Sometimes the most beautiful thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned, hence something given truly as a present.

If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that life.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a lowly editorial assistant by day and trying to be a novelist by night, no god reigned so supreme as the god of literary prose.

As someone who grew up in a logging and rail town and hiking in Glacier National Park, I am honored and humbled to be asked to serve Montana and America as secretary of interior.

The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.

I'm not devastated over a baseball game. If somebody came to me and said, 'Your wife is terminally ill.' Or, if my kids and wife get on a plane and I got a call that said, 'Something happened with the plane,' that's devastating.

I enjoy bluegrass, folk, gospel, and classical. I don't listen to music when I write. I sometimes listen to music just before I sit down to write.

My top three were Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain and Bo Jackson.

As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.

I can always tell when the mother in law's coming to stay; the mice throw themselves on the traps.

It has been wisely observed by the greatest of modern thinkers that mankind has progressed more rapidly in every other respect than in morality.

Football, that's just athletics. But in the business world - doing everything - people are competing. So you need good work ethics, and I think it helped me to develop good work ethics, being in a small town.

2008 was a good - a very successful year for Volkswagen.

Believing in everything looks a lot like believing in nothing.

When a woman has her first child in places like Africa, they're really young. They can be 12, 13,14, so their frames are really small, and they're usually malnourished.

The United States was the first country in the history of the world to be consciously created out of an idea - and the idea was liberty.

I can see there's a connection between not following normal thinking and doing creative thinking. I wouldn't have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally.

It's Niagara Falls. It's one of the most beautiful natural wonders in the world. Who wouldn't want to walk across it?

To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.

I'm terrible with patience.

A shiver runs down your spine when you realize it is not our imagination. Something is watching us out there.

I consider myself to be first and foremost a comic writer. The way I entertain myself - especially in those long and grim hours in the office - is to write stuff I find funny.

If you're going down the street and you're going the wrong way, remember - God permits U-turns.