What thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection between unseen places.

I was a very, very old child. Sometimes you meet a child who seems more like an adult. I think I was that type of child because I had a nearly fatal kidney disease when I was 9 years old.

You think you know someone by looking at his face but what can one face say about the thousand thoughts behind those eyes.

I don't remember being a child, and that's why I think I'm so child-like now in my unending curiosity and approach to life.

I think what you can’t see is always what you should be frightened of.

I write on a visual canvas, 'seeing' a scene in my thoughts before translating it into language, so I'm a visual junkie.

Asking anyone what she or he is reading is a necessary part of conversation, exchanging news. So I take recommendations from friends - and I always pass along a book I've loved.

...to make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.

I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car.

Because music is a language unto itself, when I'm writing, I need silence. I need to hear the music and the rhythms of the words inside my thoughts.

I take the world very personally. I take history personally; I want to place myself in the larger context.

Happiness is awaiting you every moment of each day for you to embrace. You just make the mistake that you need to achieve 'this' or 'that' or reach something you call 'success' in order to gain it.

The love to know is the passion for reading.

You can speak with spiritual eloquence, pray in public, and maintain a holy appearance... but it is your behavior that will reveal your true character.

Every day is a good day when you run.

Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it puts its faith not in the living God, but in dying men.

By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.

The ten thousand states of mind that we talk about in Zen are all levels of perception. You can think of each of the ten thousand states of mind as a dimensional plane.

A lot of us think we're invincible... but we have to start putting ourselves on the to-do list.

I think that we live in a moment in time where people have a lot of information about a lot of people kind of instantly, but it's all sort of surface information and it doesn't really mean anything.

In all my works, light is an important controlling factor.