Live and let live, do not judge, take life as it comes and deal with it, everything will be okay.

What's crazy is living your life according to some book written by someone who couldn't imagine what your life would be like.

Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work.

I have a great amount of confidence and faith in my abilities to write. There are other areas of my life where I'm not as confident, and have not as much faith, but when it comes down to writing and working, I don't worry about it. I trust myself to get it right.

Love is love. It doesn't matter how or who you love. I don't believe the messiah would condemn gay men and women.

I always wanted to write a book about LA, a big ambitious book. Nobody had ever really done it with LA- treating the city seriously as a major economic and cultural power, as the embodiment of 21st century America.

I close my eyes and I take a deep breath and I think about my life and how I ended up this way. I think about the ruin, devastation and wreckage I have caused to myself and to others. I think about self-hatred and self-loathing. I think about how and why and what happened and the thoughts come easily, but the answers don't.