At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.

People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life.

Whenever I went to an historical moment that was sad or where something terrible happened, it was, for me, a learning moment, a teaching moment for those who survived.

I usually feel something before I know it.

If you're just mired in privilege, there's nothing to learn; learning appears to be over.

Bruce Lee, before he fought, he would try to visualize how the fight would go, because he was visualizing a victorious path out of the combat.

Because I write intuitively and image-by-image and moment-by-moment, my writing has to be powered by feelings and emotions.

I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing.

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way.

Magical realism as a declaration in the text is usually when someone can't speak and then they must be magically reinvigorated in some way.

The natural order of life is not the thinking and imagination, but living in the moment, with absolute trust.

If you would really study my pleasure, mother, you must consider your own comfort and convenience a little more than you do.

To think you cannot fight fate is only an act of surrender.

I think the driving thing was curiosity about the universe. That fascinated me. I didn't think anything about being famous or anything like that, I was just interested in the concepts involved.

And I must bear What is ordained with patience, being aware Necessity doth front the universe With an invincible gesture.

If meditate on the third eye and have headaches it means you are trying to pull in too much power from the occult chakra. The danger is obsession.

What a magnificent body, how I should like to see it on the dissecting table.

In my experience of vegan food it tends to be a symphony of beige.

My ahimsa is my own. I am not able to accept in its entirety the doctrine of non-killing of animals.

An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.