“Step out from behind the words. When you’re a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they’re not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.”

In high school, my desire for friendship far outweighed my talent for it.

We grow too old to lose old friends.

Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.

You know how a river goes on and on? That’s my love for you.

Nothing erodes [a mother’s love]. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things-hard as the rock of this earth.

Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.

Words are the weights which hold our history in place.

Nature is not the number-one mystery, I’ve learned. It’s the heart that takes top honors.

I believe friends enclose us, like a pair of parentheses. Each one knows us differently, each sustains us in a different way.

Greed is a basic part of animal nature. Being against it is like being against breathing or eating. It means nothing.

I still perform it in all my shows. I’ll do it as long as I’m breathing. I’m so proud it has stood the test of time.

Acting isn’t a side thing – you have to live and breathe it.

The breath must be enticed or cajoled, like catching a horse in a field, not by chasing after it, but by standing still with an apple in one’s hand.

How to sustain the miracle Of being, that like a muted bell, Or like some ocean-breathing shell, Quivers, intense and still?

WE HAVE SEEN that hunger and breathing are desires of the body. There are other desires that are not of the body, but again man seldom pauses to observe these desires in himself.

Passion is not a quality that is foreign to you. It is not a characteristic that some people are born with and some must do without. To be passionate is as natural to you as breathing, as natural as being alive. It is the source of who you are.

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.