I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.

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.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

In order to understand the impact you can have on another's life by listening you need to first be intimate with the experience of being heard.

When the going gets tough, the tough make cookies.

I started Michael years ago. I saw him in Gary, Indiana, and we'd have him on the talent shows. He kind of emulated me, and did the best he could.

All damaged people are dangerous. Survival makes them so.' 'Why?' 'Because they have no pity. They know what others can survive, as they did.

I think the greatest sound in the world is the human voice.

He too knows how to lose.

Fire and swords are slow engines of destruction, compared to the tongue of a Gossip.

He's the president. I'm the general. Unless I want to get impeached, I got to do what he says.

As a filmmaker, "no" is not in my vocabulary. I've got to figure out a way.