“Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.”

Nothing makes you feel more stupid than finding out you were wrong when you thought you were loved.

Surgery is just stabbing in a courteous environment

Remember you love writing. It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.

Have more humility. Remember you don’t know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life – and maybe even please a few strangers.

Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and ­irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won’t need to take notes.

We are not all connected. We are bags of skin. We are all separate bags of thinking skin.

All we have to do is to receive what we are given…We are given the naturalness to love someone, to be calm in crisis, to ignore self-defeating suggestions, to be pleasant, forgiving, tender, helpful, unworried, brave, energetic.

If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.

We learn to be right and to make everyone else wrong. The need to be right is the result of trying to protects the image we want to project to the outside. We have to impose our way of thinking, not just onto other humans, but even upon ourselves.

Comedy is the one absolutely self-aware art form. Actually, hip-hop’s another one, I suppose. Because in your songs you’re talking about how good a hip-hop artist you are. It’s like a painter painting a panting of himself painting a painting.

The gap between our sincere values and our actual behavior is the source of all self-hatred.

If you don’t respect yourself, don’t expect others to respect you.

If one denies that, when the meaning is true, then the meant is what is so, one rejects propositional truth.

Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.