All I owe the world is my art.

The streetlight outside my house shines on tonight and I'm watching it like it could give me a vision. James ain't talked ever and he looks at that streetlight like it was a word and maybe like it was a verb. James wanted to streetlight me and make me bright and beautiful so all the moths and bats would circle me like I was the center of the world an held secrets.

Also because I'm ambiguously ethnic looking, you know, I come to New York and I can be anything. People generally think I'm half of whatever they are.

Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.

There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107)

When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.

Nobody recognizes that a bookstore or library can also be a drowning polar bear. And in this country [US], magazines, newspapers, and bookstores are drowning polar bears. And if people can't see that or don't want to talk about it, I don't understand them at all.