For hundreds of years, that was the major form of entertainment: The grown-ups sat around and watched the kids play. Now they sit around and watch the television. The actors are the kids.

The key is to get to know people and trust them to be who they are. Instead, we trust people to be who we want them to be - and when they're not, we cry.

Every day I try to do breathing exercises, meditation, and yoga. These things sound awfully cliche, but they help me slow down and try to point to a truth.

I love dogs. They live in the moment and don't care about anything except affection and food. They're loyal and happy. Humans are just too damn complicated.

I lost my virginity when I was 14. And I haven't been able to find it.

Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within.

I understand the self-loathing and the resentment, and the discipline that it takes to sit down in front of a typewriter or computer every single day, whether it's going well or not going well.

I may be learning guitar, but I'll never be able to sing.

I think the real heroic teachers are the ones who work with kids, like my mom and my sister do.

A dream is the mind's way of answering a question it hasn't yet figured out how to ask.

What makes me mad is arrogance, pretension, putting on airs.

And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.

When you find out the field you were gifted, what you were created for, you will not have to work hard and sweat it out

If you want to make enemies try to change something.

You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing.

Day Play We play all day. Night Fight We fight all night.

Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

The pickpocket is usually very well dressed and of prepossessing appearance.

I really like to write, so I can just relax and think about things and realize things and then try to express it on my computer.

So much of the world and the systems that we live within are made to keep us from feeling like we're free. The way that black women in American came to be is just diametrically opposed to being free.

I had written about a small hamlet upstate, and had been called into a meeting about my story, which, as it turned out, had upset a lot of people.