Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.

New Orleans cuisine is Creole rather than Cajun.

In the Netherlands I read the first chapter of Exquisite Corpse to an audience that laughed in all the places I thought were funny - an experience I've never had in America!

The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.

You hold onto what you have; you do not give it up easily, even when you know it is poisoning you.

You can only maintain an immensely gothic attitude for so long before either killing yourself or beginning to feel like a poser.

I can't heal your pain but I can see it. And you don't have to be lost. Not forever.

Young writers shouldn't be afraid of striving to emulate their favorites. It's a good way to learn, as long as you move on from it and don't publish too many of the results.

Never relinquish your terrors. That's when they catch you.

Ive tried to avoid labels, but they always find you.

My childhood may have been more demented than most, because I learned to read very early and was allowed to read whatever I wanted.

It always seems as though the definition of love will remain debatable by an opinionated world.

Tolerance was like one of those soothing creams—it drew out inflammation, it did away with the pain.

We're here to learn how to worship consciousness and radiance, evoke it in each other, and tolerate nothing less than our deepest love.

I would like this to be a new day. I would hope now that we can focus on doing the people's business.

Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, nature struggles to pour life, pouring life into the dead, life into life itself.

You cannot give the vice president the authority to declassify specific information and then turn around and say he can just give carte blanche to an assistant of his to declassify whatever he wants.

I'm not an instinctive actor.

Good taste is his religion, his morality, his standard, and his test.

A word spoken in loving kindness is worth far more than any gift.

I came from an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, full of abuse and alcoholism. And eventually everyone within the family had committed suicide.