"I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we thing we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old?"

"I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself."

"My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills... So my parents always struggled."

"I've said this over and over, but I'll say it a million more times - I'm concerned more about the death of a bee than I am about terrorism. Because we're losing hives and bees by the millions because of such strong pesticides."

"Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand."

"The thing is, it's not uncool to worry about people who seem like they're going on the wrong path. There's nothing cool about being self-destructive."

"Good news doesn't necessarily have to be a positive thing. Bringing good news is imparting hope to one's fellow man."

"People wouldn't know this about me, but I adore ball gowns. I love their cut, their architecture and the thought of the hands of so many seamstresses working on them."

"Let's just say that I think any person who aspires, presumes, or feels the calling to be an artist has a built-in sense of duty."

"Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down 'Desolation Row.' I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it."

"He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin."

"All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms."

"I have a daughter who's 11 years old. Maybe she'll grow up independent and really really heavy and become a movie star and she'll play me in my life story."

"It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171)."

"In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all."

"To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom."

"As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag."

"Besides me wanting to be an artist, I wanted to be a movie star."

"Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire."

"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply."

"I like gettin' old."

"I work to Glenn Gould in the morning and go to sleep listening to Parsifal."

"I never thought I was gonna live to 30."

"In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself. Entering the perimeters of the white arch, one was greeted by the sounds of bongos and acoustic guitars, protest singers, political arguments, activists leafleting, older chess players challenged by the young. This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem to be oppressive to anyone."

"Please, no matter how we advance in technology please don't abandon the book-there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than a book."

"Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream. Home is the cats, my books, and my work never done. All the lost things that may one day call to me, the faces of my children who will one day call to me. Maybe we can't draw flesh from reverie nor retrieve a dusty spur, but we can gather the dream itself and bring it back uniquely whole."

"Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with repeating images? Catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory."

"I don't fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future."

"I'm a human being, I'm a friend, I'm a mom, I'm a writer, and I'm an artist. I do play electric guitar and all of that, but in the end, I'm just a person."

"I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea."

"In fact, I thought my calling was to be a painter."

"He took twelve pictures that day.Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. 'This one has the magic,' he said. When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us."

"Truthfully, I don't really think of myself as a photographer. I don't have all the disciplines and knowledge of a person who's spent their life devoted to photography."

"In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer."

"Artists are traditionally resistant to labels."

"Everyone thinks of God as a man - you can't help it - Santa Claus was a man, therefore God has to be a man."

"You can't change the world you can't fix the whole environment. But you can recycle. You can turn the water off when you're brushing your teeth. You can do small things."

"Christianity made us think there's one heaven."

"I didn't love Jim Morrison 'cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new."

"I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one."

"He recognizes voices within silence. (of Max Sebald)"

"My mom loved rock n' roll. My father hated it. We couldn't play it when he was around. He liked classical music and Duke Ellington."

"Maybe I'll be 48 and die in the gutter in Paris."

"We didn't have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation."

"What I really like is an intelligent review. It doesn't have to be positive. A review that has some kind of insight, and sometimes people say something that's startling or is so poignant."

"My sunglasses are like my guitar."

"Secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not."

"A real prison breakfast' I said.'Yeah, but we are free.'And that summed it up."

"Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer."

"Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world."