Only cool people care about the origin stories of why they like something, and I'm not cool.

I just realized that I never look at a painting and ask, 'Is this painting fictional or non-fictional?' It’s just a painting.

Writing should be like skirts. Long enough to cover what it needs to cover and short enough to maintain interest.

Samuel Clemens isn't Mark Twain. Mark Twain is Mark Twain. He doesn't become the thing until he creates himself.

I have no interest in being a trained ballerina. People should dance how they want to dance. I want to be the funky chicken.

We like something because someone else liked it.

It's like that where these little anecdotes come through, and I guess that's what I like about books like that [He Stopped Loving Her Today]. Fiction now is so experiential.

The things that I have loved have always been those extremes where there has been some kind of apocalypse in the person's life, and they come out unscathed or scathed.

So much of our culture is bought and manufactured - not to say great art can't come out of that. Some art is really amazing that is manufactured and sold, like action movies and stuff.

I guess the things I have always loved are from people who were just being themselves. They were doing these things because they couldn't do it any other way. It was for them.

I think maybe it's my personality. People don't like my face.

They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.

I'd keep your beauty timeless. like a flower pressed in a book, yesI wouldn't let it fade Folded in the chapters of my mind

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Promise and pie-crust are made to be broken.

There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing.

The study of Buddhism is essentially the study of modification, how we modify the state of mind we're in, how we modify the realm we're in.

What faith in man must in our new world beat, Thinking how once he saw before his face The west and all the host of stars retreat Into the silent infinite of space!

Envy is so natural to human kind, that it cannot but arise.

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

The brain is an important gateway by which the social environment impacts on people's health through the mind.