It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely...and half the time you'll be wondering why the hell you're in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires. But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful... It will open up your life.

Be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of. Your life will be a hundred times better for it.

I've learned so much as both a writer and a human.

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?

I love music and listen to music all the time, but I didn't realize how much my body needed music. I needed it more than sex.

You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.