I've come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn't.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

Under the seams runs the pain.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

To realize that you do not understand is a virtue

I didn’t know who I was or who I wanted to be until you stumbled into my life. I refuse to let you go.

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

No, I don't regret anything at this point. That may change on the next phone call, but at the moment I don't regret anything.

Every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence.

we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

Genuine sincerity opens people's hearts, while manipulation causes them to close.

I've never seen any life transformation that didn't begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.

People don't want to see the guy next door on the stage, they want to see a being from another planet. You want to see somebody you'd never meet in ordinary life.

He looked like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.