Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my "real" writing.

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.

I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.

Another benefit is that the more I blog, the more I maintain and develop a first-person voice, which translates into a much greater ease with writing personal essays.

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

Let nothing human be foreign to me

Everything that has ever happened to me is still all with me.

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.

Country ham is baked whole, usually with a glaze, sometimes studded with cloves, and served as the centerpiece of Christmas and Easter feasts.

If you only do what you can do, you will never be more than you are now.

The ocean, the desert, and the jungle are the last strongholds and resorts of peace. ("Fear")

In an era where Existence is incontestable, Truth is subjective, and Reality is perceived, fiction must mediate between the three.

I'm admittedly a record guy. Singles and I are a different beast. I'm definitely an overall picture thinker.

The important thing was that I was still on the radio.

Let us not forget such words, and all they mean, as hatred, bitterness, and rancor greed, intolerance, bigotry; let us renew our faith and pledge to man, his right to be himself and free.

I'm not religious anymore, but I think it's like papal infallibility, which is a ridiculous man-made tenet, like what I believe most religious tenets to be, are man-made after the fact.

Rare are the people who can capture a human being.

The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers.

My wicked heart will ramble on in spite of myself. (Arabella)