The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

We may not be worthy to be forgiven, but He is worthy to forgive us.

All the times I've been lucky enough to be a part of a show that's actually gotten on the air, it's always that same mixture of excitement and utter fear.

The Grammys thing doesn't even touch my world at all.

To me Donnie Darko was about adolescence. And about how, as soon as you start to grow up and you sort of move out into the world, you realize everything is so trippy. That anything can be anything.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

It's the whole Nietzche philosophy of you are your own God. That's why I debase myself in the concerts and tell people to spit on me. I'm saying to them 'You are no different from me'.

She is laughing up her sleeve at you.

If you ask children in the west where's God, they'd point to the sky. If you ask children in India, they point at themselves.

A chrysanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell.