I have a great relationship with animals, and with children. I get to their level. I try to see the way a child looks at the world, it's hugely different.

That I learned even as a three year-old that I see this world that is really a mess and I learned to say, this is not me. I am not the one that is messed up. It is out there.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense; it has particular ways of catching an environment.

I'm such a long-term investor, I've never really let go and celebrated what I did with the Hubble telescope.

There really isn't a time to pause and have a celebration. I feel so serious about the whole thing.

I never read a single book as a child. I did not read as a child. I worked on the farm. I had books in the classroom, but that was it. I never read a single book outside of the classroom.

I came from an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, full of abuse and alcoholism. And eventually everyone within the family had committed suicide.

The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future.

It's hard to say what drives a three year-old, but I think I had a sense that nature was my solace, and nature was a place in which there was beauty, in which there was order.

Getting out of the comfortable path, that's what exploration is all about.

I would have taken whatever hand I was dealt. Space was it.

How unhappy does one have to be before living seems worse than dying?

Any faith that must be supported by the evidence of the senses is not real faith.

A microphone is to a comic, what a pen is to a writer. There's power in it.

You don't always win your battles but it's good to know you fought.

A change of scenery can help everything.

Slipknot sounds like Tre choking on a hairball.

To me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention.

Stop at home. Arm for Ireland. Fight for Ireland and no other land.

My values, our values, aren't about pointing fingers. They are about offering a helping hand.

If you want to make a mark you have to take a risk.