I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I'd lose my mind.

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

I met a lot of great people in Saudi Arabia and I'd like to see them again. And I'd love to spend more time in the desert and in the mountains. I felt really at home there.

Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves.

We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

Better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than in the middle of some ladder you don’t, right?

Here I am Rock You Like a Hurricane.

Again the greatest use of a human was to be useful. Not to consume, not to watch, but to do something for someone else that improved their life, even for a few minutes.

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It's just not my thing anymore.

Some men never recover from education.

But I knew what it said. That I could be imperfect, but only so much. Human, but only within limits. And honest, to her or to myself, never.

Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade: today it is the reverse.

I don't have any ambition to make lots of money or win an Oscar or anything like that. It's not about that for me.

Life can be beautiful, profound, and awe-inspiring, even without an irate god threatening us with eternal torment.

I have the utmost respect for the different faiths professed by my fellow men.

There have been people in my life who have told me I have to put myself out there more. But it's so hard for me to do that.

The nice thing about growing up in that kind of environment is you were exposed to so much -- music, plays, art exhibits, rock concerts.

Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live.

Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics.