“Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.”

Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down.

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.

Good to evil seems evil

If we try to deny the darkness in our souls then we’ll become completely dark.

Creativity is a continual surprise.

You can make yourself happy or miserable – it’s the same amount of effort.

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

You fail only if you stop writing.

You’ve got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

There’s no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it’s immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.

I don’t believe in government. I hate politics. I’m against it. And I hope that sometime this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

You can’t try to do things; you simply must do them.

Vegetables are organized bodies that grow on the dry areas of the globe and within its waters. Their function is to combine immediately the four elements and to serve as food for animals.

All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.

Natural bodies are divided into three kingdomes of nature: viz. the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. Minerals grow, Plants grow and live, Animals grow, live, and have feeling.

We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.

I have this sense that I didn’t really start growing up until my twenties.

And in between the calm and the chaos you are evolving.

The value of life is not in its duration, but in its donation. You are not important because of how long you live, you are important because of how effective you live. And most people are concerned about growing old rather than being effective.

I would love to someday do a play. I did one when I was very young in San Francisco, where I grew up. A girl can dream.