“The future is merely a shadow which blocks out the joys of the present and emphasizes the miseries of the past.”

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.

Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye.

We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.

Betrayal betrays the betrayer.

In loving life you love what can’t survive.

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not exhortation.

I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.

Anger is really disappointed hope.

People are interested in their own sexuality and they’ve always reflected it in their art. End of story.

How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one’s nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.

The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.

You can play some schlock like New Kids On the Block.

I don’t know how many of you have been to New York, but if a building is two blocks away from anything, you can’t see it.

When we were at the Apollo, Holiday was a block away. I asked her for her autograph.

I like that Pilates compromises the mind and body. It’s not just about being able to run around the block a few times.

Everybody was happy my brother was locked up.

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.

It ain’t made for everybody, but I knocked a lot of blocks down.

I didn’t do any of the crimes that the man two blocks over at the White House is responsible for.