There's always tons of crap music people are trying to sell us - [it's] the same way with publishers and galleries.

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.

Live life fully in the present & enjoy the small things in life that give you joy, for the seemingly small & insignificant moments add up to a greater whole.

My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.

What right can give anyone authority to inflict torture upon a citizen when it is still unknown whether he is innocent or guilty?

The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.

A true friend is one who overlooks your failures and tolerates your success.

No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing begins to sort itself out.

Just so far as we are pleased at finding faults, are we displeased at finding perfection.

We will have to wait a little longer to see if Armageddon has arrived.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

Medicine today invests heavily in information technology, yet the promised improvement in patient safety and productivity frankly have not been realized.