Most of what I do is for creative people - writers and painters and photographers - trying to work through creative problems.

Feminism now seems to be defined as success is defined: as being as good at capitalism as men are. I feel very estranged from it.

I understand maybe some people are more impressionable than my hard, cynical self, but maybe they need to figure out how to be less of that.

I was twenty-one when I was hired by Planned Parenthood. It was my first work experience outside of either temping or working for my father at his store.

Once you leave, you're no longer of that country, but you are never actually of the country that you go to, and if you go back, you're not anywhere. You never belong to anything.

American culture never necessarily made sense to me, but they should warn you: leaving comes with a huge sense of alienation that never goes away.

Talk to people who know more than you. I feel like we're in this stupid sea of opinion, like "My opinion is valid because it's mine and I have it."

You don't have to go to New York and you don't have to go to LA or London. Go somewhere cheap. Go somewhere with free art museums and then just go to art museums.

Go to a place and just send out emails. That's my entire life. I go to countries and I ask, "Who would I know who lives here?" Not even do I know, but who exists and is on the planet.

There's this resistance to actually talking to people who are smarter than you about things and I don't know why that is.

I knew my motivations for going to each place and what I was looking for. If I don't do that then I generally don't write about my travels.

I could be the drumbeat in your chest like madness before a storm swirling restlessly.

You can believe in Christ and not reflect Christlikeness

The enormous pitfall is devotion to oneself instead of to life. All works that are self-devoted are absolutely ineffective.

The greatest problem America faces is the decline of middle class incomes.

So what’s wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?

Acting for me is finding those things that, finding the strings of humanity that tie us all together. And you only find that by living life and loving and breaking up.

When a rap song glorifies violence, death and sadness and loss is inflicted because of the violence.

Telephone operators have called me sir since I was 6.

If we were a primitive society, movie stars would be gods.

I feel like I've always played within the rules. I would never do anything to break the rules. I believe in fair play.