I felt just overwhelmed by input: the Vietnam War and the collapse of the '60s and the proliferation of media' it just felt like everything was too much to handle and you just tuned out.

we still have the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building and the Woolworth Building, but it just seems like part of the nature of New York, that it's always shifting.

Things always change, and New York teaches you that.

Another thing that's good about writing to describe a situation or a state of consciousness is that you can finally get it right. That was my intention, and that's always interesting.

The purpose of rock n' roll is to convince girls to pay money to get close to you.

In fact I thought life was pretty much a losing proposition, and I didn't mind saying so.

I'm usually alone or asleep, at home.

I do everything halfway, a thing of which adults disapprove, but things done halfway are deceptive, and in a class of their own – for instance, the sun is really twice its size.

A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

I shake my head and the tiny acrobats fall like spangles, like the cool rain on another planet, down to the inside of my feet.

A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.

There's no love more intense than the love we have for our kids - and where there is intense love, there is also intense fear lurking beneath the surface.

When life gives you lemons, throw them at the zombies.

Exploration is wired into our brains. If we can see the horizon, we want to know what's beyond.

Running with the bulls was one of my crazier judgments in life and one of those things I decided to do spur of the moment. It was pretty hilarious.

A man goes to a psychiatrist. "Nobody listens to me!" The doctor says, "Next!"

Love can conquer everything but reality. Which will win every stinking time.

A guest should be permitted to graze, as it were, in the pastures of his host's kindness, left even to his own devices, like a rational being, and handsomely neglected.

Believe God's love and power more than you believe your own feelings and experiences. Your rock is Christ, and it is not the rock that ebbs and flows but the sea.

I just found out last week - my sister told me - that my father had some Beatles records. So I must have heard them quite a bit, but it never registered, really. Now I listen to them with new ears.

You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.