"You are fairly smart," I said after a while. "You are fairly good at compliments," he answered.

Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center.

I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater.

...And in freedom, most people find sin.

So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

A taste so profound and complex that it can't even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, tastes like love without the fear of love's dissolution.

My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.

Piece of Heaven?" "No, that other place I'm going to go to for thinking what I'm thinking.

What is courage without fear?

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The friendship of Shostakovich cast a brilliant light over my whole life and whose spiritual qualities captured my soul once and for all time.

I wanted to write about how people's beliefs shift.

I'm not naturally manipulative.

I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.

I just want to be someone, to mean something to anyone.

The moment you see someone attractive, you can't help but make note of it. It's human nature.

The craft, the writing of a song, is about creating a story, a life story, a world within three minutes, but that's the frame, if you like, the picture frame. That fascinates me.