No perfectionist has ever met his own benchmarks, and no one so famished for admiration has ever received enough of it.

Travel is an exercise partly in broadening yourself and partly in defining your own limits.

My risk tolerance is higher than some people's, but it's not nearly as high as some people's. I don't want to exaggerate my bravado. I haven't been on the front lines. I haven't ever stepped on a land mine.

But the admiration for Jackson was by no means confined to his own soldiers and to his own section.

I didn't need to borrow money from the record company, because if I had my own publishing company, and I had my own writers, I'd have enough to get and do whatever I wanted to do.

A great hope gets crushed every time someone reminds us that happiness can be neither assumed nor earned; that we are all prisoners of our own flawed brains; that the ultimate aloneness in each of us is, finally, inviolable.