One area I have a huge amount of trouble in is writing about myself. I get a heavy, almost depressed feeling.

I was a stepchild in two different families. The hardest thing about being a stepchild is you know that in some way everything would be easier if you didnt exist.

If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.

Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.

Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.

Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.

I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.

The answers were maddeningly absent—it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.

Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.

The more I want to get something done the less I call it work.

Sensuality isn’t a crime, though you act like showing a little skin will kill you.

Better fare hard with good men than feast with bad.

For me my friendship with Omar Rodriguez from Mars Volta that friendship really means a lot to me because he's another creative person who works as hard as I do.

My integrity means more to me than any fame or money. When I say something, I want people to take it to the bank that I mean it and believe in it.

If I asked people to live as I live, they would kill me.

Solve the race problem here, and once you solve the race problem here, you don't have to send these billions of dollars abroad.

I like playing really super-intense, live-in-the-moment characters. It asks me to not phone it in. It's impossible to phone it in. Every American boy has spent his childhood pretending to get shot.

Nowhere inthe annals of history does the record show a people delivered from bondage bypatience alone.

I would say that I think the film [I am love] is absolutely about nature, it recommends human nature. You don't need to recommend change, that's inevitable, it's the only reliable thing we have.