What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

Everybody likes to have a place to think, to meditate, to eat a burrito.

If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.

He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.

Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.

If you teach kids how to tell stories, they have a better chance at everything.

What kind of life can you have in a house without books?

Don't live up to your stereotypes.

When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.

If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.

Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.

As long as you're feeling good with your weight and the way you look, that's what matters.

They never differentiate between drug users and drug addicts... I've done most drugs there are socially, I never had a problem.

Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them.

I'm painting an idea not an ideal. Basically I'm trying to paint a structured painting full of controlled, and therefore potent, emotion.

People like to re-invent you, according to cliché. There are a lot of stores about me that really apply only to Capote or Mailer or somebody else. Everything is a mish mash.

It was Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who coined the phrase Survival of the Fittest.

I'm a mutt as far as music is concerned, because I listen to everything.

On TV they keep their kids. Love them.

The great blessing of life is the existence of tomorrows - and having dreams to realize.

Adversity, and perseverance and all these things can shape you. They can give you a value and a self-esteem that is priceless.