That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Humans have grown like a cancer. We're the biggest blight on the face of the earth.

Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.

You can purposefully use your feelings to transmit an even more powerful frequency, by adding feeling to what you are wanting.

Come at me scrublord I'm ripped!

Canadians shouldn't come down to Southern California and take jobs away from Mexicans.

The planet is about to break out with fever, indeed it may already have, and we [human beings] are the disease. We should be at war with ourselves and our lifestyles.

A best friend isn't just someone who's always there for you. It's someone who understands you a bit more than you understand yourself.

Effective leaders make a full commitment to be a learner, to keep increasing and nourishing their knowledge and wisdom.

When evolution has been outlawed, only the outlaws will evolve.