"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."

"You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn't make a mockery of your values."

"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."

"If you can’t save your own life, is it even worth saving?"

"There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet."

"People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there."

"It can only take a moment to waste the rest of your life."

"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!"

"It doesn't matter where you are coming from. All that matters is where you are going."

"You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened."

"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."

"Never forget that anticipation is an important part of life. Work's important, family's important, but without excitement, you have nothing. You're cheating yourself if you refuse to enjoy what's coming."

"There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards."

"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."

"If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's."

"The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse."

"I think that you’ve got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way."

"Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls...are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered."

"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."

"The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us."

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."