“When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you’re suffering in.”

I’m fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality.

I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.

Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

Maybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.

We can still astonish the gods in humanity And be the stuff of future legends, If we but dare to be real, And have the courage to see That this is the time to dream The best dream of them all.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

Literature doesn’t have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.

People that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.

I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.

There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…

a dream can be the highest point of a life

Inspiration is there all the time. For everyone whose mind is not clouded over with thoughts whether they realize it or not.

Realizing that anyone can do it is the first step.

When I was younger, I felt like I could say anything and it was funny.

You’ve got mountains of your own, I’ll bet on it. Take heart. Be encouraged. Remain steadfast.

Growing up in New York, I was sort of shocked when I realized that my children are Californians.

Realizing that everyone (consciously or subconsciously) feels alone too – but no matter what, we’re actually ALL together – is what has helped evolve my way of thinking about it.

Feeling alone is what most likely sparked this way of thinking.

They’re all a huge influence on me. For me, just following rock history and watching Darkness On the Edge of Town and realizing that’s it’s okay to be obsessed with a snare sound because Bruce Springsteen was obsessed with a snare sound.