I beg you take courage; the brave soul can mend even disaster.
You have to be born with it. You can't even buy it. If you could buy it, they'd have it at the next Newport Festival.
Anybody can play. The note is only 20 percent. The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.
It's not the note you play that's the wrong note - it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.
If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I'd spend it choking a white man. I'd do it nice and slow.
A painting is music you can see and music is a painting you can hear.
It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.
war is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things.
The people who have impacted the world didn't live long. Martin Luther King. John F. Kennedy. These people who impact the world were not old people, but they lived so effectively that we cannot erase them from history.
There is no old age. There is, as there always was, just you.
My stepfather, John O'Hara, was the goodest man there was. He was not a man of many words, but of carefully chosen ones. He was the one parent who didn't try to fix me. One night I sat on his lap in his chair by the wood stove, sobbing. He just held me quietly and then asked only, "What does it feel like?" It was the first time I was prompted to articulate it. I thought about it, then said, "I feel homesick. " That still feels like the most accurate description - I felt homesick, but I was home.