I hate playing the bass, bro. I've been playing the bass because it's there and I don't want anyone else to play it.
I'm a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.
In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.
If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.
Places matter. Their rules, their scale, their design include or exclude civil society, pedestrianism, equality, diversity (economic and otherwise), understanding of where water comes from and garbage goes, consumption or conservation. They map our lives.
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.
Art is the conveyance of spirit by means of matter.
One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren't happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.
If any race of people should not have guilt about slavery, it's Caucasians.
Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.