I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.

Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.

How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it.

It's such a liability to love another person.

Find someone who will tremble for your touch, someone whose fingers are a poem.

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

Beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.

We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally, by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves.

It is the quietening of the day that most appeals.

Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.

The idea of the nest in the bird's mind, where does it come from?

My grandmother, when she looked at American movies, she said, 'They're all the same. In the first scene somebody shoots somebody and then everybody makes phone calls.'

Gardens always mean something else, man absolutely uses one thing to say another.

You make more money selling advice than following it. It's one of the things we count on in the magazine business -- along with the short memory of our readers.

Every single person who's drifted in and out of your life is a part of your divinely chosen experience. So, give thanks for all of these people, and take serious note of what they brought you.