Your own experience keeps taking you towards something. My book adds the hope that it's a better something.

The idea of licking stamps seemed great fun for me.

I've got a new relationship and I'm trapped in this old life.

Gag me with a spoon!

I like to think of myself as a New Yorker, which is pathetic.

I would think: Stay close to the implants! They must know something because they keep getting asked backstage!

If there's anything more mortifying than being famous at 14, it's being washed up right after.

I made enough money to buy a house. That's crazy, but fame proved ephemeral.

I grew up with too much freedom. You can't define yourself.

I had a friend whose family had dinner together. The mother would tuck you in at night and make breakfast in the morning. They even had a spare bike for a friend. It just seemed so amazing to me.

Not many people know what their parents sound like having sex. It was noisy.

My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn't realise I was going to get educated.

I'm totally convinced I can write the perfect pop song.

My Dad was so open creatively that I was off in search of black turtleneck bathing suits with long sleeves.

I should just drive around this city and take photos of all the buildings I've been humiliated in.

Every job I've ever gotten has been an accident. All the jobs I actually go after, I don't get.

I didn't have any concept of age or authority. I remember realising, Oh, the world has rules and we don't.

My mother did literally hitchhike barefoot to the country store.

I spent most of my life locked in my bedroom, miserable about my raging acne.

It occurred to me, when I was old enough to make rules of my own, that they should be fair and simple.

How strange, when your father's wearing women's clothes and platform shoes, that a pair of loafers looks incredible.

We had two rules growing up in my house: If you're going to take a shower, do it with whomever you're dating so you don't waste water; and if you buy one for yourself, buy six, because everybody's going to want one.

I peaked early. I was told I'd missed my boat.

I think I have a dark view of the world. I have to make everything funny, otherwise it all seems so sad.

Your own experience keeps taking you towards something. My book adds the hope that it's a better something.

I don't want to lose my name because that's how I know myself. There is a legacy here.

I have a tree man coming to trim the jacaranda in my front garden.

Everyone has flaws. Its a matter of finding the ones you can live with.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.