Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.

Don't dunk your nigiri in the soy sauce. Don't mix your wasabi in the soy sauce. If the rice is good, complement your sushi chef on the rice.

your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.

I don't like to see animals in pain. That was very uncomfortable to me. I don't like factory farming. I'm not an advocate for the meat industry.

The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca.

Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.

I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

Anyone who doesn't have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me.

Good food is very often, even most often, simple food.

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.

I'd learned something... Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me... and others. This was valuable information.

Every night, I have to read a book, so that my mind will stop thinking about things that I stress about.

I can see how you could get dragged into the bad stuff, but I've got good friends around me, good family. I think I've got my head screwed on.

We must beware of yielding to the pressure of a spirit of cowardly conformity which proclaims itself everybody's friend in the hope that everybody will obligingly return the compliment.

In a way it's the emotional feeling that you get in a good rock song or folk song, there's just nothing that rivals that.

I thought it was very humanitarian of Sean Penn and Madonna to marry each other. That way, they make only two people miserable instead of four.

I really do enjoy getting out to meet my readers. Writing is such a solitary business, it's gratifying to thank folks in person and really connect as human beings and not just words on a screen.

Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffer, not the state.

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

Punish the deed, not the breed.

The only cure for loss of illusions is fresh illusions, more illusions, and always illusions.