I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with.

Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.

I probably have fundamentally antisocial tendencies. I never took one extracurricular activity. I just failed utterly at that level. Part of me still rebels against that.

To fly we have to have resistance.

An artist fights to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision. Art is and should be the act of an individual willing to say something new, something not quite familiar.

Our lives are given meaning by our actions-accomplishments made while we are "here" that extend beyond our own time.

If we forget what used to be, then we’ve lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.

You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.

I didn't have anyone to play with so I made up my own world.

OK, it was black, it was below grade, I was female, Asian American, young, too young to have served. Yet I think none of the opposition in that sense hurt me.

I suspect that a greater and more insidious influence [than violence in movies] may lie in what they tell us about being in love, and how to conduct ourselves while in that condition.

No matter where I went, where I’ve gone, what I’ve seen and what I’ve done…you have never not been wit’ me. You’ve always been my home.

My poetry is not lyric. The epigrams are lyric because they come from my youthful period of lyricism, but my other poetry is not lyric.

I don't want to see blood spewing out but I don't mind it in controlled environment. Does it make me squeamish? No.

It is like being in the desert. At first you listen to the absence of sounds and call it silence. Then suddenly you may be taken by the presence of stillness where you are one with listening itself.

You are enough, which I believe is critical for any human being to get in their bones.

We envy people we love for being always in their own loved company.

A life of gratitude to God for being saved is far more pleasing than a life based on self-righteousness over being good.

Why am I dying to live if I'm just living to die.

Failures in art usually lead to something else interesting.