If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel.

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.

Americans no longer experience vacations. They simply Sony them so they can ignore them for the rest of the year.

It's not knowing how to write that makes you interesting, it's what you write.

I was a pretty happy kid, I had to fake it. I had to get into this miserable character before I wrote poems.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.

Light may seem at times to be an impertinent intruder, but it is always beneficial in the end.

I had serious performance stage fright. I kept my singing to the confines of my shower and car, while doing the dishes, and in my basement, but I would burst out crying if anyone asked me to sing.

The other big lesson from Katrina is that it pays to be prepared. But it's also very difficult to stay prepared because the longer you go between events the more you'll see complacency.

I start phone calls at 4 A.M. to cheer people up. The housebound, people in the hospital. People who, after decades, still can't get over what happened 10 or 15 years ago.

My principal objections to orthodox religion are two: slavery here and hell hereafter.