Choosing is existence. To the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

He'd fought hard, Lida told me, as if there was another way to fight.

Proverbs 9:10 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.

Is It Frightening To Be Free?""You said it.""You Say To People 'Throw Off Your Chains' And They Make New Chains For Themselves?""Seems to be a major human activity, yes.

You must empty out the dirty water before you fill the pitcher with clean.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

You'll live forever, and being remembered by is the only immortality I'll ever need. If i only live on as a part of you--Bianca, that's my idea of Heaven

I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.

Women should be someone and not something.

You aren't afraid of what you think you're afraid of - you're afraid of what you think.

When I go to a concert, I can't help but feel happy and everything else just goes away. I hope everyone feels that way at my concerts.