Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan.

It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.

Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things. As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.

I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

You see only the beautiful things when you stand still. You only see things that you don't ordinarily notice. The birds are the prettiest things, I imagine.

In the temporary illumination of the headlights, the insects were scribbling out messages from God that we couldn't get.

Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction.

The stars are always up in the sky...then when it is perfectly black, they feel less vulnerable and out they come.

Somewhere, a sparrow is singing in B minor.

From the way that people have always talked about your heart being broken, it sort of seemed to be a one-time thing. Mine seemed to break all the time.

The next time someone tries to make you feel bad about feeling good, respond by continuing to live well.

The word friends doesn't seem to stretch big enough to describe how we feel about each other. We forget where one of us starts and the other one stops.

I remember rap music. We used to party and dance off of it. Today it's all about a whole different angle... Rappers are going against each other, and it's more of a bragging, boasting thing.

I put confidence in the American people, in their ability to sort through what is fair and what is unfair, what is ugly and what is un-ugly.

I screwed up. It's all on me. I know that...All these hiccups I have, they must be for a reason. All this is just a test. I just don't know what the test is yet.

I love the broad margin to my life.

Perhaps you're not finished with your story, and who knows if you'll ever finish it or not. Honestly, it's not that important.

I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies.

I fell in love with Scotland and made good friends here, so I stayed after graduating with Honours in Chemistry.

What the American family does not want is to pay an increasing fraction of their budget, their precious dollars, for energy costs.