The rules your parents teach you to live by are very different than the rules the world actually runs by. Most of the conventional wisdom is not only wrong, it's a lie told to us by people who want to control us. It doesn't help us, it helps them. Pretty much everything we're told as children (and adults, really) by the established power structures in our lives are made up fairytales us to reinforce that control: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, fat-free frozen dinners, religion, and metering lights on the highway--the list goes on

Failure either ruins you, or turns you into the man you can become.

I don't want to compare myself to Picasso, but he had four or five periods in his life. Any good artist grows and changes and matures.

I'm not West Coast at all. I was born in Atlanta, but I grew up in Kentucky, outside of Lexington, in Winchester.

Look at the scope of writers who sell stuff. I'm at the very top of the power curve in terms of sales.

That's the beauty of alcohol. If you don't remember it, it didn't happen.

The thing that I think about the most, and is the most rewarding to me, is the whole past. That I kind of went from nothing to something and I did it on my own, and I did it through hard work and smarts.