Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.

Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.

Originality is unexplored territory. You get there by carrying a canoe - you can't take a taxi.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can't bring back anything to life.

Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in.

Jean Paul Sartre says in "No Exit" that hell is other people. Well, our task in life is to make it heaven. Or at least earth.

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.

It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich.

It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art.

I give thanks for ever increasing health, youth and beauty.

I think I have a reputation for being really serious. In interviews I use big words, but I'm just an emotional goofball. I play practical jokes all the time.

I am a New Yorker. I like New York. And I like cities. And it's not my desire to make New York more suburban. I would personally just like to vet each person.

My best advice is to work out with a buddy. They keep you motivated and get you out of bed.

The only woman a wife should ever be jealous of is her husband's mom.

Whether the pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits the pitcher, it goes ill with the pitcher.

I often think, no one wants to read this. No one wants to hear this. My own work makes me cringe sometimes, cringe in a "there's nothing I can do because it had to come out like this" kind of way.

Government should uphold-and not undermine-those institutions which are custodians of the very values upon which civilization is founded: religion, education and, above all, family.

Rules are, like an ashtray-in-progress, meant to be thrown, poked and reshaped to suit yourself.