All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care.

It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing?

Eventually, I think you find a spiritual and emotional connection with someone, and I think it unifies you with everyone else. I think if you love one person, it makes you love everyone.

For me happiness occurs arbitrarily: a moment of eye contact on a bus, where all at once you fall in love; or a frozen second in a park where it's enough that there are trees in the world.

All penguins are the same below the surface, which I think is as perfect an analogy as we're likely to get for the futility of racism.

If you have no brothers and sisters it defines you for life; even when you're thirty you refer to yourself as an only child.

The only Revolution that can really change the world is the one in your own consciousness, and mine has already begun.