"To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom."

"I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business."

"From very early on in my childhood - four, five years old - I felt alien to the human race. I felt very comfortable with thinking I was from another planet, because I felt disconnected - I was very tall and skinny, and I didn't look like anybody else, I didn't even look like any member of my family."

"In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth."

"Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration."

"But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer."

"A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen."

"When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before."