We're programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You're supposed to work and suffer - and the trouble is: you believe it.

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.

It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.

You don't have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.

Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married.

We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box.

Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.

Tears are a form of communication - like speech - and require a listener.

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but having no outlet, it implodes in a great fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.

A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

When we connect with our personal authenticity and truth, the vitality that is triggered becomes an eternal spring of regenerative passion that continues to expand our experience.

Empathy is a breaking down of the false constructs of division between the observer and the observed.

Some judge of authors' names, not works, and then nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men.

Listen first and never stop listening.

When the movie's done, you talk about either the score or source music over a particular scene, what might work. You just throw a piece of music over the scene, and we both listen to it.

I like their Christ, but I don't like their Christians.

I pride myself on finding balance. I love making music and I love raising my boys - I find time to make both a priority.

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.