I guess my writing has changed as my life has.

there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.

Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places.

Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.

But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window--maybe rearrange all the furniture.

When I sit down and write, I do it to relieve myself of the madness that burdens me so that new words can wrap me in newer, better, madness.

People say there are thousands of options we have in life. I say we have only two: we can either be happy or be unhappy.

Having harvested all the knowledge and wisdom we can from our mistakes and failures we should put them behind us and go ahead.

There is no justice in killing in the name of justice.

Envy wounds with false accusations, that is with detraction, a thing which scares virtue.

Joe Louis is the hardest puncher that I've ever seen... He's a good man. Anyone who plans on beating him had better know what they're doing.

The best way to handle responsibility is to break it down into smaller parts. Take care of one small thing at a time.

It isn't enough just to do right things and say right things, you must also think right things before your life can come into harmony.

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night.

I live in a neighborhood that's really filled with sound - there's a lot of Jamaican auto body shops, and the guys next door play hip hop.