You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

To have mercy and truth requires love, good understanding and respect.

My whole life is controversy. What can I do? I'm like Britney Spears!

Nothing comes of severity if there be no leanings towards a change of heart. And if there be natural leanings towards a change of heart, what need for severity?

In my house you have to talk to cats because, being ten of them, there are a lot of important things you have to say to them-like 'Get off' and 'Shut up' and things like that.

If I were an Arab-American, I would insist on being profiled. This is not the time for civil rights. There are larger issues for Americans.

For me, the music is always like the small rowboat I get into at the very beginning of my process.

If true, rarely beautiful. If beautiful, rarely true.

We played every bar, party, pub, hotel lounge, church hall, mining town - places that made Mad Max territory look like a Japanese garden.

It was my destiny to love and say goodbye.

Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America...