When you’re in love you don’t have to do a damn thing. You can just be. You can just stay quiet in the world. You don’t have to move an inch.

As my mother once said to me, ‘They’re quite crazy, dear – men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.

Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

In truth, there are only two realities: the one for people who are in love or love each other, and the one for people who are standing outside all that.

Needing something is not the same thing as being interested in the thing itself.

You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.

If you want to see the consequences of ideas, write a story. If you want to see the consequences of belief, write a story in which somebody is acting on the ideas or beliefs that she has.

Gainfully unemployed, very proud of it, too.

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.

There is no weather in malls.

And magic exists to break the rules.

We must be happy with what we want when we are in pursuit of what we want.

Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll.... It does not mean that everything in life is relative.

I think when people watch a lot of artists, they're expecting this showiness, and I'm cracking jokes with people. I'm heckling back. I'm interacting.

I kind of knew that there were a lot of people that didn't go to church and normally wouldn't listen to people, but they would come and listen to me talk.

Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

I've always been really curious about things and slightly confused by the world, and I think someone who feels that way is in a good position to be the one asking questions.

I was abducted by aliens as a boy. Aliens is the name of a pedophile who lived in my alley.

I'm cleaning toilets for $30 a day, because I needed that $30, and people are pointing at me, saying, Look at the big movie star. Look where he is now. I just said, I'm where God put me.