“In memory everything seems to happen to music.”

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.

If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

An artist must believe in himself – Possibly not so passionately as Lawrence – but passionately.

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing.

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life–live!”

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love.

Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.

Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.

Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light.

The human heart would never pass the drunk test…. If you took the human heart out of the human body and put a pair of legs on it and told it to walk a straight line, it couldn’t do it.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.

Time doesn’t take away from true friendship, nor does separation.

Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour — but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands — and who knows what to do with it?

I want to be here for a long time, so I am going to do everything I have to do to be here. And I want to walk my daughter down the aisle and give her away to somebody some day.

Basketball was always a game to me. One of the greatest things in life for me was to be able to play what I loved dearly and get paid for it. So it was always a game to me and that’s how I perceived everything.

Everything that I will ever accomplish, I owe to God, to my parent’s sacrifices, and to the United States of America.

I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever.

When you’re an adult, things mellow out. I think when you’re a teenager and you are sad and the world is ending, everything is about that one sadness.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.

Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.