Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
To me, it's always interesting to see what people end up regretting, as a way maybe to avoid such regrets in your own life.
I've spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion.
My novels are high concept. I guess big ideas interest me more than, say, the minutiae of domestic life.
Yet the evil still increased, and, like the parasite of barnacles on a ship, if it did not destroy the structure, it obstructed its fair, comfortable progress in the path of life.
If I must choose between healthy and tasty, I go for the second: having only one life to waste, it might as well be a pleasurable one.
Most of my recipes start life in the domestic kitchen, and even those that start out in the restaurant kitchen have to go through the domestic kitchen.
The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens.
All the libel lawyers will tell you there's no libel any more, that everyone's given up.
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.
Children must be considered in a divorce considered valuable pawns in the nasty legal and financial contest that is about to ensue.
Each day, each one of us chooses not to do many things that would be legal but offensive to those around us.
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
Everything that pushes up out of the earth I love. Everything under the earth, root vegetables, I love to cook.
If I am going somewhere exotic, I take an empty suitcase with me to bring back the objects I fall in love with.
Every theory of love, from Plato down, teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself.
Caregiving has no second agendas or hidden motives. The care is given from love for the joy of giving without expectation, no strings attached.
I love character and voice, and my favourite books have been the ones in which I've become completely absorbed.
The only reason I don't want to commit adultery is because I love my wife and I love my lord.
After a while, if you're a writer, you want to start appearing in the bookstores of the place you're living in.
I have never said anything critical about Ozzy that he didn't say about himself many times.
