Most good essays are conversations with yourself - not just your decided thoughts but your dilemmas.

The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.

Hedonism can be a rational response to a difficult life.

The essay must be artistically rendered: You must keep the reader engaged, whether with wit, conflict, mischief, and/or yes, with honesty.

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

The trick is to realize that one is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.

A personal essay often includes some or a lot of personal confession. That makes the reader feel less lonely in their confusion and darkness.

Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience.

Confession makes you a more trustworthy narrator.

In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort.

I am apt to be harsh in my secret judgments of others, seeing them as defective because they are not enough like me.

Acting is happy agony.

I set up a laboratory in the Department of Physiology in the Medical School in South Africa and begin to try to find a bacteriophage system which we might use to solve the genetic code.

You know what I always say about basketball whenever anybody tried to tell me the Knicks are gonna be good: They're old. Old people don't get healthy. They die.

You can't really write until the characters kind of show up one day and tell you what they're going to say. You start to hear the rhythm of the way the people talk, and then it becomes easier.

I'd spent so long trying to fit in,trying to be someone i wasn't,that i had no idea who i was any more.

The best way to help Israel deal with Iran's growing nuclear capacity is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.

If you descend into somebody else's private hell and stand there with them, it ceases to be hell.

I can really recommend a beautifully but sparsely furnished room with empty walls!

All these kids who are growing up on Skrillex and all this digital music- what are they gonna think when they hear rock'n'roll?

It is not the particular man in power that I oppose, but the power itself, which is unjust.