I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

God, in his infinite wisdom, hid Hell in the middle of Paradise, to keep us on our toes.

The few moments of heaven were not worth the hell he put me through when he was done.

A man's past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.

I'm writing the book to a children's musical. I got a note from the producers saying, "Can't you make it campier?" So now, I'm trying to determine the camp sensibility of the average eight year old.

As I get older, the more I don't want my life to be emotionally out of balance in the way it was in my twenties.

Showing up is not all of life - but it counts for a lot.

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.

I feel that segregation is totally unchristian, and that it is against everything the Christian religion stands for.

There are two classes of men; those who are content to yield to circumstances and who play whist; those who aim to control circumstances, and who play Chess

I have sparred with commenters as a music writer (on The Rumpus, among other places, see e.g., my review about Taylor Swift), and that was plenty of training!