Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.

I've been thinking so much about writing as a gift to readers - and how newness of subject (place or topic or person) is one of the biggest gifts at our disposal.

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.

Today's truth will be tomorrow's lie and you will be left questioning your own sanity.

To live as fully as completely as possible to be happy ... is the true aim and end to life.

My songs always sound a lot better in person than they do on the record.

You see, to me, the art of music is listening to it, not playing it. The real art of it is hearing it.

If we cannot agree, let us at any rate agree to differ, but let us part as friends.

[European Union] a giant cartel that suits big multinationals.

Crooks aren't the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world.

What did my parents say when I told them I wanted to be an actor? 'Be a plumber.'

Fear is a human instinct, just like hunger. Whether you like it or not, you become hungry. Similarly with fear. But I have learned to train myself to live with the fear.

Pretty girls come a dime a dozen, try to find one who's gonna give you true loving.