Maybe with "Californication" the character was partly based on Rick Moody. I read him and Jay McInerney, the templates for this bad boy novelist.

The key is to get to know people and trust them to be who they are. Instead, we trust people to be who we want them to be - and when they're not, we cry.

Every day I try to do breathing exercises, meditation, and yoga. These things sound awfully cliche, but they help me slow down and try to point to a truth.

I love dogs. They live in the moment and don't care about anything except affection and food. They're loyal and happy. Humans are just too damn complicated.

I lost my virginity when I was 14. And I haven't been able to find it.

Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within.

I understand the self-loathing and the resentment, and the discipline that it takes to sit down in front of a typewriter or computer every single day, whether it's going well or not going well.

I may be learning guitar, but I'll never be able to sing.

I think the real heroic teachers are the ones who work with kids, like my mom and my sister do.

A dream is the mind's way of answering a question it hasn't yet figured out how to ask.

What makes me mad is arrogance, pretension, putting on airs.

Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that prevents evil from arising in either.

Once we have seen Him in a stable, we can never be sure where He will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation He will descend in His wild pursuit of men.

The American essayist William Deresiewicz wrote that "no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.

My dad was an engineer, and he became the CEO of Chevron. His was an engineer's mind-set: Everything's kind of a problem how do you approach the problem?

I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library.

The future never comes. Life is always now.

Don't tell me what I'm doing; I don't want to know.

If you're on the path you're meant to be on, everything falls into place; the Universe is telling you that.

So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere?

All the masters tell us that the reality of life - which our noisy walking consciousness prevents us from hearing - speaks to us chiefly in silence.