"Music has to be written while people are still excited about a particular melodic or rhythmic sequence. The idea doesn't come out the same if we're not really excited about it."

"Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others--not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art."

"I'm a teenager, but I'm independent - I have my own apartment, I have my own life. And I think I have learned more than any of those teenagers have in school. I learned to be responsible, leaving my family and coming here alone."

"The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web."

"If at 1st you don't succeed, stretch out on your La-Z-Boy with a six-pack and a porn flick. Y' still won't succeed, but you sure as hell won't give a shift."

"Much as slavery in the United States was part of a larger Atlantic Slave System, so America’s War of Independence was an outgrowth of Europe’s Seven Years’ War — from 1756 to 1763 — and also a precursor or harbinger of the French and Haitian revolutions and of the subsequent Latin American wars for independence from Spain."

"Three,' reckoned the captain, 'ourselves make seven, counting Hawkins, here. Now, about honest hands?'Most likely Trelawney's own men,' said the doctor; 'those he had picked up for himself, before he lit on Silver.'Nay,' replied the squire. 'Hands was one of mine.'I did think I could have trusted Hands,' added the captain."

"However, more important to all of that: the players played the game as a true team. There are many teams in baseball, but not all play as a team. Many merely play as a group of talented athletes, which is a huge difference over the course of a long season."