I guess I don't really know what I want to do, either. Sometimes I feel like a shook-up bottle of soda. Like, I have all this passion that wants to explode, but I don't know where to aim it yet.

The feeling it gave me was an odd combination of weightless self-pity and excitement. I understood my life was meaningless, and this knowledge freed me up to accomplish absolutely anything.

I was really drawn to spoken-word style poetry. I loved the rhythms, and for some reason, I was just drawn to this poetry as a way of expressing my feelings, because I didn't have any other outlet.

When I'm there, it's pure silence. There are other writers there, too, and I get super competitive. I have this weird fear that some guy next to me is writing this amazing novel, so I got to compete.

Being the first to go to college in my family was a great thing, but it was also a source of guilt. I felt like almost a sellout going to college.

I feel like I have a lot of novel ideas, but they often come up while I'm already in the process of working on a book. You have to watch out with the slutty new idea.

Growing up as a mixed-race kid myself, when you are in the middle of it and you're young...you don't think about it consciously. It's your reality.

To me, if the writing doesn't have rhythm, it feels dead. I lose all confidence. The music has to emerge to feel confident enough to move on to the next major chapter.

But not just alive like I was yesterday and the day before. Alive like I knew I was alive. Like I could feel the breaths coming into my chest. And I knew I was the person inside my own body.

Sometimes when you're surrounded by dirt...you're a better witness for what's beautiful.

I stayed there on the floor like that for a long, long time.Eating and crying.Crying and eating.

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

War is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts.

If you want to understand how a lion hunts, don't go to the zoo. Go to the jungle.

I'm seen as a chronicler of the class system, which I don't think is unfair.

I'd rather be useful than rich. It's more essential to feel you're doing something that's worth doing, rather than making a lot of money.

In drawing, I often think of things as flying buttresses.

Love is insistent on its own continuation. Every fraction of a second, someone somewhere falls in love, a former enemy becomes a friend, and a newborn baby is born into the world.

Any MP has to have a proper family life, they have to have support of their partner.

Basically, you're selling a world as an actor, right? I mean it's like any sales person: if you believe in your product, you know your product, you sell it a lot better.

The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.