Eventually I went back to high school. I went to a coaching center in my neighborhood. I had to leave the homeless situation because it was so bad and I knew that I was falling deeper and deeper.

When you win, we win; but when you go down, you go down alone.

Nobody supported me; my family thought I had gone crazy. They thought, you crazy gangster, you crazy drug addict, now you want to be a writer? That's it! They totally gave up on me after that.

Nobody had books at home. My dad was a very educated person, so he would have books at home. All Spanish books. That helped. Most of my homies had no books at home.

The more you know, the more you owe.

I'm not really anti-gang - I was a gang member and so was my son. I'm pro-youth, pro-community, pro-family, pro-arts, and pro-peace.

There are choices you have to make not just once

I've always been prepared to write about the hard things. Only for healing, teaching, and enlightening purposes not to hurt or disparage anyone.

In order to stay out of trouble I worked in industry. You can't even do that nowadays; there were all those factories.

I was kind of a weird homie; I was a weird kid. Nobody in my family loved books. I'm the only one.

If you give in to temptation, you may have a moment of enjoyment, but then you'll have a lifetime of regrets.

The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.

God doesn't punish us.We do that all by ourselves.

...God and your heart both whisper - incline your ear - don't just learn from your head...

Pain is like a map, I guess. But I found my shortcut on my "map of the heart." Shortcuts always take longer, don't they?

Being in therapy is great. I spend an hour just talking about myself. It's kinda like being the guy on a date.

Terrorism is the intentional use of, or threat to use violence against civilians or against civilian targets, in order to attain political aims.

You make your own choices, Kira, and you can’t let anyone ever take that away from you.

Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.

The path of a cosmonaut is not an easy, triumphant march to glory. You have to get to know the meaning not just of joy but also of grief, before being allowed in the spacecraft cabin.