If you over-plan, you close the door on possibilities.

My mother answers all my fan mail.

I hated the makeup. I hated all that pancake makeup. I didn't really like dressing for parts.

I'm certain, as we filled down the great staircase, that I appeared the same as ever, a moping twelve years-old, all arms and legs. But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

My father was a dreamy fellow - he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games.

The way our big cities change sucks. The beauty of cities was that they were edgy, sometimes even a little dangerous. Artists, poets, and activists could come and unify and create different kinds of scenes. Not just fashion scenes, scenes that were politically active. Big cities are getting so high-end oriented, business corporate fashion, fashion not in an artistic sense but in a corporate sense. For me that edgy beauty of cities is lost, wherever you go.

It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).