Yeah, I left Idaho at 17. You know, I graduated high school a year early and just, you know, the typical story, packed up my car and moved out.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.
It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone assures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.
We're all hoping that Trump doesn't get our world on his terms because there won't be anything of it left. Trump is a true psychopath, a psychopath in the way that tragedy becomes tragedy.
Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that.
Marrying the right girl is even more imperative today than it was when I was 23 years old because it's so much harder to get on as an imaginative writer like me now. You need to have somebody who believes in what you're doing and who never is skeptical about what you're doing. My wife thought it was a great thing for me to be a writer because in practical terms it freed her to do what she wanted to do, which was work.
You can't always go to the well and have things be funny.
There are other ways I think of myself as spoiling myself. . . I. . . get a massage once a week. Other people can, I didn't used to, and I can now.
Understanding is the least important thing when it comes to digging jazzbecause, like anything else, jazz is a form of entertainment. It is created to be enjoyed, not understood like you read a blueprint.
BE GRATEFUL EVEN for hardship, setbacks, and bad people. Dealing with such obstacles is an essential part of training in the Art of Peace.
What is human behavior, except trying to prove that we're not animals?