I have a publishing company of books by me and books of others. It drew people to poetry readings and photo exhibitions and painting exhibitions that I've been doing for years before that.

There's no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there's no excuse for boredom, ever.

I have never been in a natural place and felt that it was a waste of time. I never have. And it's a relief. If I'm walking around a desert or whatever, every second is worthwhile.

It's hard not to get depressed when you pay attention to the world and how strangely and corrupt the people in it sometimes behave.

When I have a day off, I won't spend it at a Hollywood party. I'd rather be at home with paints and a blank canvas.

You should always do the things in life that are both interesting and make you afraid.

Be kind. It's worthwhile to make an effort to learn about other people and figure out what you might have in common with them.

You don't have to make something that people call art. Living is an artistic activity, there is an art to getting through the day.

I think that every person has many, many people inside of them. We change our personality depending on who we are talking to or what situation we are in.

I think every family is dysfunctional, and some manage to control it better than others.

My job as an artist, as I see it, is to understand and in some cases to take on various ways of thinking about people and the world that are different from my own, sometimes radically different.

If someone tries to use you as a tool, you shouldn't mind it, because it is their choice and folly, not yours.

Words are never insufficient to describe any situation. It is the talent to use the words which is the insufficient one!

I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.

But I love to entertain. My vocation is to accrue all these experiences, to write about them, to get them out of my system, to not get sick, and then to share them publicly.

[Donald] Trump would want to cosy up to him for sure, and he'd be right to do that. Which would be good for the world.

I want to touch you in real time not find you on YouTube, I want to walk next to you in the mountains not friend you on Facebook.

American Hustle shows the FBI making real-life bribes to Washington politicians. I know, because as your U.S. senator, I turned them down.

In China, the social network is a bit different. But I am active there too.

God requires a faithful fulfillment of the merest trifle given us to do, rather than the most ardent aspiration to things to which we are not called.

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.