For me writing isn't a mental exercise, it's barely even a literary exercise, it feels like a spiritual experience.

I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist.

I love art because I feel that it's evidence of the great shared universal power. I like art that feels real, that cuts the bullshit.

I've always really enjoyed sharing my work with others. I find it really hard if I don't think the work will exist outside of my own apartment.

If you look at the horror genre, that work is all about making people uncomfortable by stimulating our fear of death.

You can't be a free spirit in a place that feels like it was built on lockdown.

I hope that I'm the kind of person who would step in between somebody holding a gun at somebody else. I would like to be that stupid. I'd like to be that in love with life.

I don't like talking too much about my personal life, but it all goes into my work.

I had to brainwash myself, like what I was doing was going to be really, really good, and then just accept whatever happened.

I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing. And it was my secret thing and my passion.

Anyway, I don't trust those people who poke around sad people's minds and tell them how interesting it all is up there. It's not interesting.

As if you are their mother, be kind to others.

Pain is weakness leaving your body.

I probably described more times than I can remember how stressful it was advising the President [Barack Obama] about going after Bin Laden.

I can carry a tune with a three-note range. Once I'm out of that range, I'm in trouble.

All of us, whether or not we're celebrities, every one ought to spend part of their life making someone else's life better.

A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe.

Conversation is the image of the mind. As the man is, so is his talk.

I think one of the most important things I can give my children is the right to be themselves.

The new fad thing that's going through America and around the world. It's called global warming.

If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.