Things don't always end up the way we planned but it doesn't mean the plan wasn't magical while it lasted.

I’d rather be a hopeless romantic than a skeptic, because while the hopeless romantic may get burned many times, the skeptic will never really experience love.

It is brutal. Only I never could see the sense in having folks look at your tombstone and say, 'He was a man who didn't believe in violence, He's a good man... and dead.

Beautiful thoughts precede a beautiful life.

As it so happens, Mr. Jest, I’ve sometimes come to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast…

I live my life free of compromise, and step into the shadows without complaint or regret.

I really don't get nervous when I perform - it's more of an exciting feeling than anything else. But put me in a classroom with kids my age and have me take a test and yeah, I'll be nervous!

L.A. is still such a fascinating place to me, so big and diverse. It's so spread out that you can go from Zuma to downtown and there's really like 10 different towns in between.

How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means suppression: that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it.

The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.

As far as I remember, there was no actual lyric written to that.At the very beginning of "Fiddler on the Roof," there's a violin solo, an unaccompanied violin solo.

We tend to put the environment last because we think the first thing we have to do is eliminate poverty. But you can't reduce poverty in a vacuum. You are doing it in an environment.