When I'm there, it's pure silence. There are other writers there, too, and I get super competitive. I have this weird fear that some guy next to me is writing this amazing novel, so I got to compete.

The feeling it gave me was an odd combination of weightless self-pity and excitement. I understood my life was meaningless, and this knowledge freed me up to accomplish absolutely anything.

I guess I don't really know what I want to do, either. Sometimes I feel like a shook-up bottle of soda. Like, I have all this passion that wants to explode, but I don't know where to aim it yet.

I was really drawn to spoken-word style poetry. I loved the rhythms, and for some reason, I was just drawn to this poetry as a way of expressing my feelings, because I didn't have any other outlet.

Being the first to go to college in my family was a great thing, but it was also a source of guilt. I felt like almost a sellout going to college.

I feel like I have a lot of novel ideas, but they often come up while I'm already in the process of working on a book. You have to watch out with the slutty new idea.

Growing up as a mixed-race kid myself, when you are in the middle of it and you're young...you don't think about it consciously. It's your reality.

To me, if the writing doesn't have rhythm, it feels dead. I lose all confidence. The music has to emerge to feel confident enough to move on to the next major chapter.

But not just alive like I was yesterday and the day before. Alive like I knew I was alive. Like I could feel the breaths coming into my chest. And I knew I was the person inside my own body.

Sometimes when you're surrounded by dirt...you're a better witness for what's beautiful.

I stayed there on the floor like that for a long, long time.Eating and crying.Crying and eating.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight and no vision.

If we really want to live we'd better start at once to try.

If you want total security go to prison. There you're fed clothed given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking ... is freedom.

In reality, Kyoto was a huge transfer of resources from the United States to the Third World, under the guise of environmental protection.

France is hypocritical and cowardly. I sometimes think that, having been invaded by the Germans, we'd be run better today.

Spaniards have always shown great maturity and great common sense when it comes to voting.

That celebrated marriage of science and art, photography, seemed at the time to join together how we look at the world, art, with how we were coming to know it, science.

Treat a thousand dispositions in a thousand ways.

I was angry at my parents when I had to have brain surgery, that they weren't still around, because no matter how old you are you want you parents when you're going through something like that.

The Latin motto over Poindexter's new Pentagon office reads Scientia Est Potentia - "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you.