...it's like this white-Indian thing has gotten out of control. And the thing with the blacks and the Mexicans. Everybody blaming everybody...I don't know what happened. I can't explain it all. Just look around at the world. Look at this country. Things just aren't like they used to be.' 'Son, things have never been like what you think they used to be.

Religious fundamentalists are unaware that freedom of religion necessarily brings with it the freedom to mock religion.

In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.

The poetry, if you will, of life is reduced to this sort of dry, scientific, you know, it's the worst sort of précis of who we are.

It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.

They put me in a holding cell with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We're the United Nations of juvenile delinquents.

I was studying the sky like I was an astronomer, except it was daytime and I didn't have a telescope, so I was just an idiot.