If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.

I didn't think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.

I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.

Mostly, I think people are fake. Well, what do you expect? The fake world we live in conspires to make us all fakes.

I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.

Words were different when they lived inside of you.

I think writing books is a way for me to work out certain issues. I write about what matters to me, always.

I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.

If you want to be a writer, you don't want to live in a comfortable place.

You are thirst and thirst is all I know

But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.

It is only in solitude that I ever find my own core.

I know it's difficult in the beginning. But, listen. If you have the impulse to write, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, and write.

A heartfire, Clementine my darlin', is when you want someone, when you need her so damn bad, not only in your bed but in your life, that you're willin' to burn--".

Biological engineering is not necessarily understanding systems but rather, I want to be able to design and build biological systems to perform particular applications.

There's a pianist out of Boston who made a beautiful record for the Fresh Sound label called "Sketch Book"; his name is Vardan Ovsepian.

Id never really considered film. If Id thought about film more growing up, I probably would have changed my name. I had no concept of my name in lights.

It's not just a question of conquering a summit previously unknown, but of tracing, step by step, a new pathway to it.

Without real exchange, you can’t create knowledge.

Writing music is just something that I was born to do.

Feminism is to sexism what black nationalism is to racism; the most rational response to the problem.