I am trying to both be happy and pay attention to the world around me. I do not know if it is possible to do both at the same time.

Killing yourself slowly is still killing yourself. Wanting to die is not the same as wanting to come home. Recovery is hard work. Not wanting to die is hard work.

A writer's goal is to weave the ordinary into fine silk and the truly extraordinary into diaphanous clarity ...

Basically, if you're not a utopianist, you're a schmuck.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

The broader question if Sarah Palin becomes vice president, will she be shortchanging her kids or will she be shortchanging the country?

The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him.

Lancaster, California ... that promised land sometimes called 'the west coast of Iowa.

I grew up in Boston, so it's a nice change to be cold after living in California.

The idea that there is a rational truth out there that is not embodied in a person's politics is something I can't understand or subscribe to.

My favorite healthy foods are Jamaican chicken soup, Jamaican chicken stew peas, Jamaican brown stew chicken, plantains and banana chips.

What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.