“No child wants to fail. Everyone wants to succeed.”

Teach them to think, ‘I’m not stupid’. No child wants to fail. Everyone wants to succeed.

So that’s my little ministry that the Big Man upstairs gave to me – a little ministry called love and happiness.

Some people believe that fairness comes with obeying the rules. I’m one of those people.

I’m not religious in any formal sense, not in any God sense.

In my own mind, I was sort of a desperate kid.

And it occurs to me that if I were aboard a rowboat floating in the middle of all the beer I’ve drunk in a lifetime,

I started writing when I was about thirteen.

I don’t think I do have a soul.

What they have forgotten they have forgotten: what they meant to do instead of fall is not in earth or time recoverable the fossils of intention, the shapes of rot.

Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest.

If I could live my life all over I’d do everything the same; the film in my camera would remain the same; there’s no way lord, to leave this love behind.

Pakistan’s being an ally and helping the United States, we ought to show

I’m thankful for every moment.

I did a whole concert in Atlanta with my fly open, and I had a black suit on and a white shirt. My white shirt was protruding from the fly.

I learned more stuff in church than I did in the world.

I have found people on both sides of the aisle, white and black, that’ll give you the shirt off their back.

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that’s the inheritor of our fear.

I was rather a goody-goody as a child… It was only later on I discovered that you could be naughty and get away with it.

If you listen to that song and knew anything about me, you’d say, “Oh yeah, he wrote that about his daughter,” but I try not to write them that they are so specific that they wouldn’t apply to anybody that has a child.

I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I’m glad of.

My attitude is that if anybody of any age wants to read a book, let them, but I do think that no child would want to read Boneland.

I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.

I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books.

I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn’t really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you’re trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.