In fact, not knowing is a necessary condition of writing for me. I don't know how else to reach something unexpected. I have to be as in the dark as my characters.

Things, very strange things, happen in folktales and there is never much attention given to the whys and wherefores.

But every age deserves its fashion and its forms, and no one can control what survives.

Why did people try to shush trouble away as if it were an unruly child?

Writing, for me, is always a dance between the critical part of my brain and the subconscious.

I guess I'm drawn to stories of people whose physicality puts them on the outside of things in order to explore the ways in which an identity is formed around these prevailing attitudes.

I never know where I'm headed when I'm working on a book.

We are like flowers always reaching up towards some shred of light. I find this wondrous, nearly magical, certainly brave.

I'm interested in endurance. People persist in the face of the most excruciating hardships.

As we change, the way in which we are perceived in terms of our relevance, our value, our beauty, and sexual potency changes.

We grow, we mature, some of us give birth, we age, we die.

There is nothing we could ever do to make God love us more

Jack Kennedy brought an "intense concentration" and a "gently teasing humor" to the dinner table, along with what Katherine Graham called his habit of "vacuum cleaning your brain.

I don't really get into architecture in the hotel room. But maybe a little Feng Shui here and there.

I got interested in politics during the civil rights movement and then Vietnam.

I hope that people can relate to my music, it's very relatable, it's very fun, it's very honest.

You learn from the good, you learn from the bad.

Be at the pains of putting down every single item of expenditure whatsoever every day which could possibly be twisted into a professional expense and remember to lump in all the doubtfulls.

For instance, the most common type of "affordable housing" in the world comes in the form of apartments over stores.

First you must have the images, then come the words.

As much as I make my music for me, I make it for the people who rock with me and follow me. They're the inspiration behind it.