I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.

I have no interest in ever making a movie I didn't write. If they were going to take my house away, then I guess I might have to. But my agent knows not to even bother sending me the scripts.

I am on the road all the time. Whether I'm in Paris or in a small college town in Texas, I can't tell the difference, and that's good. You don't have to leave where you were born to be cool anymore.

I've always tried to keep reinventing myself and to keep appealing to young people and when I go to colleges now and do my spoken-word show it's astounding to me how I get older and the audience gets younger. To me, that's the best compliment. That's better than money, that's better than anything.

I couch-surfed for years. But I always wanted to live in Baltimore; I still do. If I had to choose, it would always be Baltimore.

True success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.

If you purposefully look to shock people, it isn't funny. That's what 50 million dollar Hollywood comedies do; try to be shocking and dirty. They aren't really. It isn't enough to shock. It's easy to shock. Real surprise is what I'm after. Those early movies, we had drugs, which you weren't supposed to show. You weren't supposed to shoot up. We would make fun of hippies. I think that we were punk before there was punk.