Living on Earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

Sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.

Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.

Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.

I've given guys blow jobs just because I've run out of things to talk about.' Oh, Rae. Who hasn't

You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.

But it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.