After my experiences with the 5:2 diet, I wasn't interested in a short-term fix that would fail later. I wanted a way of eating that made me lose weight without feeling deprived.

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.

I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.

Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my "real" writing.

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

Let nothing human be foreign to me

Everything that has ever happened to me is still all with me.

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.

Meditation is defined by not just the mode of thinking, but also the object of thought

The only freedom that lasts comes from pursuing what we want when we want what we ought.

Rock and roll music, if you like it, if you feel it, you can't help but move to it. That's what happens to me. I can't help it.'

Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.

Holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night!

Idleness is emptiness; the tree in which the sap is stagnant, remains fruitless.

You keep lyin' when you ought to be truthin'.

I want to manufacture a feud.

When the truths of love are planted firm, they won't be hard to find. And words of love I speak to you will echo in your mind.