The muse holds no appointments. You can never call...

You know, when I was a kid waiting on the bus, I remember that was when I imagined my life. I imagined everything that I was gonna be when I grew up and I imagined all of these amazing journeys and amazing people I'd meet. Of course, all of it has kind of come to fruition.

My dad was quiet, angry, shut down. So my thing is: I express everything that's there. I want to get it all out.

Sadness is a very interesting idea, this idea of sadness being some kind of default setting that artists will go into. And then I started thinking about this idea of sadness and happiness, and the idea that sadness is very loud, and happiness is quiet.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.