It's highly competitive to be here. People don't come to California to drop out anymore. It's a very striving place.

If the Pilgrims had landed in Santa Monica Bay rather than Boston, we'd have six states out here!

A city where everyone seemed to live in a bungalow on a broad avenue lined with palm, pepper or eucalyptus trees, where there was never any snow.

I don't reverberate to victimhood, probably because of my own life. I refused to become a victim myself, so it's not one of my big stories.

I like narrative, and I ultimately am in love with the men and women I write about, most of them.

In our public life, California is on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country.

The Irish didn't read and write for a couple of thousand years, and I think we developed good memories and recall. We have a sense of the revelatory detail. I look for them.

In every moment, you are blessed with the empowerment of choice. Choose wisely, it is an investment into your quality of life.

Politicians and sports coaches both need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters.

Being a pumpkinhead is great.""Your HEAD is a PUMPKIN.

Even in the presence of others he was completely alone.

I made the mistake of thinking that if you add up the past, you sum up the future; I forgot how frequently life astonishes us.

Some people don't realize that I've had a career pre-commercials.

If you don't have a seat at the table, you're probably on the menu.

I wrote my sonic meditations and started using them with students. I took a bunch of UCSD students out to Joshua Tree and we did the sonic meditations on the boulders.

Uge, save me from the sauce of their loveyness-raso Forest Born

It must be observed that our revenues are raised almost wholly on imported goods.