Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.

The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service

We're here to get each other through this thing, whatever it is.

Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.

It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.

Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?

Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.

With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you’re zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.

Colds, ulcers, flu, and cancer are things we get. Schizophrenia is something we are.

Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff.

¡Hundieron el Maine!” said Manuel to his wife Etervina, as he read the newspaper on February 16, 1898. “They sank the Maine!

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

The only thing you find in the middle of the road are dead animals and dumb Americans.

It was important to have a similar energy in my performance. To make the character too different would have just been about my ego because it didn't need to be drastically different.

I think we must never, ever demonize one another. That's true not just black people to black people; that's human being to human being.

The mediocre always feel as if they're fighting for their lives when confronted by the excellent.

How useful are documentary photographs if there is no follow up, no way of knowing what happened next in the story?

I'm really proud to have been in The Craft. I will always be that chick from The Craft, no matter what I do.

I am so deaf I am debarred from hearing all the time articulation and have to depend on the judgment of others.

You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.