“Life may be a grand folly, as you say, but it is harder to appriciate the joke when you're always the butt of it.”

“And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.”

“He wasn't always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company.”

“What an absolute folly love was. Talk about a flawed concept.”

“That man truly loathes you," Herbert says when he's sure Rourke isn't coming back. "I don't think so," I smile. "I just give his life focus, that's all.”

“I don't tell you this story today in order to encourage all of you in the class of '04 to find careers in the music business, but rather to suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don't wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren't paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you're lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don't come with guarantees.... The question then is this: How does a person keep from living the wrong life?”

“Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?”