[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.

Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

You cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself.

We all have an inner intuition for authenticity, for matched up internal and external truth. When we detect this, we feel immediate comfort. We know truth when we hear it.

It is not so much upon the number of exercises, as the care with which they are done, that progreses and skill depend.

Keep up appearances whatever you do.

I became chairman of the inmates committee. Got into a lot of trouble. Was accused of fomenting a riot. Was accused of plotting to kill the warden.

I just want to believe in a higher power. That's a good way to live.

It was all right until the sun came out and then everything started getting warmer.

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance.

The only problem we've had is the amount of time it's taking people to develop titles.

When you break goal into increment and start controlling your time, things begin to happen.