Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know. --After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.

Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.

We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?

Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.

Again the greatest use of a human was to be useful. Not to consume, not to watch, but to do something for someone else that improved their life, even for a few minutes.

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It's just not my thing anymore.

It had ever, as I told the reader, been one of the singular blessings of my life, to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with some one....

All stories are true. But some of them never happened.

Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.

Toy Soldiers was my introduction to film. I certainly didn't think I was doing art by any stretch of the imagination.

The search which takes place in my studio might best be described as a mining operation, a vertical dig in which a number of discoveries are apt to surface from a single shaft.

God can be trusted. He keeps His promises. He doesn't make any mistakes.

When I was fifteen or eighteen, I never even imagined I would be in a band, let alone being able to travel to places like Australia and New Zealand.

If I hadn’t left Texas, I might not have met the director Terrence Malick, and I wouldn’t have met my husband and I wouldn’t have had the children that I’ve had. Life is interesting like that.

Fearlessness requires attention and receptivity-it takes focus to stand in the still eye of a tornado and not be swept away by it.

The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after two minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless.