“Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.”

I don’t think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star

If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it’s because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that’s the most revolutionary insight of all.

Humor is one of the most serious tools we have for dealing with impossible situations.

A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.

I have accepted fear as a part of life – specifically the fear of change… I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.

Fear is a sign-usually a sign that I’m doing something right.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That’s one reason old men can send them to war.

I don’t think you will ever fully understand how you’ve touched my life and made me who I am.

Every time we hit an air pocket and the plane dropped about five hundred feet (leaving my stomach in my mouth)

Creativity demands nothing less than all you have. Talent alone is never enough.

Divorce is my generation’s coming of age ceremony – a ritual scarring that makes anything that happens afterward seem bearable.

Compose with utter freedom and edit with utter discipline.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

How could one create life with someone who represented death?

Home is where your books are.

Intolerance has always been with us, you know. The moment you have ideology, we have intolerance, whether it’s the secular ideology or, you know ideocratic ideology, which always brings with it some kind of intolerance.

The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.

If I’d gone straight to the NBA, I don’t think I would have been ready as a player or a person.

I have been so long master that I would be master still, or at least that none other should be master of me.

I was just a big fan of tattoos always growing up, and I wanted something cool that symbolizes what I’ve been through in my life, and everything on my chest and my back is like a collage.

My wrists are crooked and don’t go all the way back. I’ve been practicing and working on them. You can’t do everything good.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.