Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

A real diamond is never perfect.

The world is full of stupid people. That's why we have rules. But with enough intelligence, a person can be above the rules. She can make rules.

Do you ever wish, Alexis, that your heart was just that little bit smaller, so that you didn't have to care quite so much?

Ultimately love is everything.

What you see on stage is pretty much the way I am... a dry sense of humor.

And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call 'sustained incoherence.

I can't just have one painting - I need to cover the wall in paintings. It's the same with my music. I want to mix everything together to create more.

There's people outside our house; you get followed by photographers; you can't go out and have a cup of coffee with a friend without someone coming up to you.

I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon.

All rehab can do is tell you what’s wrong with you and then suggest ways for you to get better.