“I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.”

I’m not sure how to describe my style. A lot of my work is dark and looks a bit sad, which is strange because I’m such a smiley, over-the-top positive guy who wears gold shoes most days.

Men are separated by so many petty things.

My success is not measured in money. I have no financial security, I have no savings account. I measure my success by asking myself if I’m telling a story that the world needs to hear, if I am educating people.

I want to tell you what it was really like to think death is imminent, but I can’t. It’s a taste in your mouth. And an emptiness.

More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.

Everest is completely out of control. It’s like crack.

Photography has the power to undo your assumptions about the world.

War is death. If we are to engage in war, then we should have to stare it straight in the face and call it by its rightful name.

War is the greatest failure of mankind.

Your belief system saturates the space around you.

I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.

Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.

Although the theory of relativity makes the greatest of demands on the ability for abstract thought, still it fulfills the traditional requirements of science insofar as it permits a division of the world into subject and object (observer and observed) and, hence, a clear formulation of the law of causality.

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending? What would that look and feel like?

I think everybody deserves freedom. Freedom is such an abstract word, but it’s all we need.