Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective.

Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.

How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.

Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.

You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.

Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.

Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

You won’t understand life and death until you’re ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.

I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.

I would love to speak a foreign language but I can't. So I grew hair under my arms instead.

I'm not into extreme sports or something. I just live a quiet life.

Every decision that Donald Trump makes is going to impact his bottom line of some business that he owns all over the world. So it remains a huge issue.

It's important to stay creative.

We are at war with men, and most women don't even know it.

The price of being close to the President is delivering bad news. You fail him if you don't tell him the truth. Others won't do it.

Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.

I wouldn't want to be just pigeonholed as an extravagant director.

I learn through listening and watching other performers that are very good, like Denise Chávez, Dorothy Allison.