At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought...?

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Man is most free when he is most guided.

The nations are as a drop of a bucket.

I assume Obama knows about stop and frisk, so this is not the person that should be the head of homeland security. I had to say something. Kelly's nomination would go against who President Obama is.

We are not what happened to us, we are what we wish to become.

When I record somebody else's song, I have to make it my own or it doesn't feel right. I'll say to myself, I wrote this and he doesn't know it!

Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than a shovel.

If you paint a man leaning over your own back must ache

The success of 'Scrubs' allowed me to pursue anything I felt passionately about without having to worry about money. It allowed me to spend my summer work shopping my show at a nonprofit theater.