“Maybe I can hide it. Yes, I think, perhaps you can bury something of yourself to live well with others, but if you want to be alone . . . well, let them see it all.”

“Keith Haring wrote " You see that's why I work like a dog and I worked like a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing because my problem is my own transformation. Thats the reason also why, when people say. " Well you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else," my answer is[laughter]" well, do you think that I have worked like that all those years and not be changed?" This transformation of ones self by ones own knowledge is,I think something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting.”

“Well, I guess I'll become a thief, then," said Pica unhappily. "though I don't think I'll be much good. I'm a pacifist, you see?”

“What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.”

“What do plants eat? They eat dead animals; that’s the problem. For me that was a horrifying realization. You want to be an organic gardener, of course, so you keep reading ‘Feed the soil, feed the soil, feed the soil…’All right. Well, what does the soil want to eat? Well, it wants manure, and it wants urine, and it wants blood meal and bone meal. And I…could not face that. I wanted my garden to be pure and death-free. It didn’t matter what I wanted: plants wanted those things; they needed those things to grow.”

“That's when it happened. An understanding, a new realization, cameinto her head and triggered a transformation that was almost total. Maybe this was how all learnign worked in the end. The right kind ofoncentration deployed in the right way at the right time. If youpaid attention and sorted carefully, put things in the right place at the right tiem, it was possible to think yourself away from yourself, away from the things you could not do.”

“When you love yourself, utterly and completely, all of yourself, what you will discover then is that you love others, all others, utterly and completely.”