I think that young people understand me perfectly. I think that's the luckiest thing about my career, that I get older and they get younger, and it didn't stop with my generation.

It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.

Don’t sleep with people who don’t read.

My idea of an interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a career.

True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.

Without obsession, life is nothing.

[My catholic education] sticked with me. It caused the rage I had to make 'Pink Flamingos.'

Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.

Do we secretly idolize our imagined opposites, yearning to become the role models for others we know we could never be for ourselves?

I like hard movies; I like ones that are basically the opposite of a date movie.

The "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" hitchhiker really made people never want to hitchhike again - the hitcher, the show. Hitchhiking is always vaguely sexual.

You matter, Mama repeated. Not because of whose son you are. Because of who you are. You're as important as every other human being that ever was or ever will be. Everyone matters.

I am kinda lost, don't know who I am, what am doing, and why I am in it. Everything around me is more like a weird dream. I wish I could wake up. Before the dream finishes me.

Oliver liked to play the part of disaffected youth, but he liked shopping in SoHo even more.

For a woman who's a widow and pretty much a loner, I can walk out, and I'm surrounded by NYU kids. The energy jumps off the sidewalks, and I never feel sad or bored.

Why can't you understand? The stars fall down now and then. The gaps have to be filled.

Leadership is influencing a community to follow Jesus.

People are strange, but more than that, they're good. They're good first, then strange.

Come Dance with Me , come dance.

I get so nervous before I go on stage that I can never eat very much, so I'm always completely starving afterwards and dying for a bowl of pasta.

I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.