I want my fellow citizens to wise up and stop falling for [war]. I try with my limited access, I'm not getting into Kabul with a camera, they're not letting me get into Benghazi with a camera. I do what I can with my flimsy American passport and a visa. The photos are a bit more heavy from Southern Sudan and Haiti and Cuba.

Nelson Mandela will always be the face of South Africa. The traveler passing through the country will see Mandela's face almost everywhere he looks. Truly, the man is omnipresent.

I am an optimist because I want to change things for the better and I know that blood has to be spilled and disharmony and cruelty are necessary to do that.

Do it or don't. It's amazing how many things in life are that easy.

I get angry about stuff, I get very emotionally intense about stuff and that's how I get it out - with books, with the band, on my own onstage, but it's always kind of a wail.

I think to write fiction, this is just how I see it, you have to have a powerful need/desire to connect. I can't. Wanting to and not being able to has lead to a lot of misery in my life.

A text conversation is a short exchange of often grossly truncated language that corresponds to a thought made all the more shallow by the process.