To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity...

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

Life is a series of collisions with the future.

I am I plus my surroundings; and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

To wonder is to begin to understand.

We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.

The perfect state of creative bliss is having power (you are 50) and knowing nothing (you are 9). This assures an interesting and successful outcome.

The older you get, the easier it is for you to distinguish between your friends and people you are not seeing for the first time.

I started creating

I never saw [Allen Ginsberg] as some kind of crazy figure.

When something is finished, that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting - I just stop working on it for a while.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

Trust that things will be okay - especially if you put in the time and effort to make them be okay.

We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes - while our competitors get average or worse results from brilliant people managing broken processes

It's a lot easier, I think, to be an actor in a movie than to spin a joke on a sitcom.

I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.