But during all these years I had a vague but persistent desire to return to New Orleans. I never forgot New Orleans. And when we were in tropical places and places of those flowers and trees that grow in Louisiana, I would think of it acutely and I would feel for my home the only glimmer of desire I felt for anything outside my endless pursuit of art.

The greatest create of power you have on earth, whether you are an angel, a spirit, a man or woman or child is to help others.

What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of normality that is just a myth.

Pride is the parent of destruction; pride eats the mind and the heart and the soul alive.

God, what is it like to be You and hear all those people all the time everywhere, begging, imploring, calling out for anything and anyone?

‎There's no way to cheat a sensualist like me, somebody who can die laughing for hours over the pattern of the carpet in a hotel lobby.

I wasn't sent here to find angels! I wasn't sent here to dream of them. I wasn't sent here to hear them sing! I was sent here to be alive. To breathe and sweat and thirst and sometimes cry.