“You do it for yourself. You don’t expect to change the world. You don’t even expect to influence your family or your friends. You do it because you can’t not do it and be who you are. Or who you’re meant to be.”

“When you have friends, don’t expect your friends to fill your emptiness. When you get married, don’t expect your spouse to fulfill your every need. When you’re an activist, don’t put your hope in the results. When you’re in trouble don’t depend on yourself. Don’t depend on people. Depend on Allah.”

“I believe that if you don’t want to do anything, then sit there and don’t do it, but don’t expect people to hand you a corn beef sandwich and wash your socks for you.”

“In LA, you can’t do anything unless you drive. Now I can’t do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn’t possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it’s an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF-BOOZE – NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run!”

“Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are.”

“Attitude is 100% under your control – (yours to choose, use or lose, as they say)Happiness, fulfillment and satisfaction in a life ALWAYS and ONLY come as a consequence of some other activity. That is you don’t just create ‘happy’ or ‘satisfied’ – you have to be doing something with your life that as a byproduct creates these states.That’s it.Told you it was simple.Alright, I admit, writing about how to create a ‘successful life’ is easy – because to create something out of your life is 99.9% Mental Focus and 50% ( as Yogi Berra would say and .01% for those of you who are paying attention) -knowing how to get the result and doing it.Writing about it is easy; it’s the doing that’s hard.”

“In two years you can love somebody with all your heart and lose them. You can become the very best of friends with someone and then neglect them to the point that they don't expect anything different from you anymore. You can become someone you never expected and forget things you believed you could take for granted about yourself.”