There is a limit to how much you can change to be liked for who you really are.
Even drunk, I knew any escape plan that involved going to Detroit, Michigan, was a harbinger of doom.
It is a great moment in every freak's life when he or she finds out that at least they are not the only one.
I start with fear. It comes in so many forms. When I write, some of the fear goes away. So I write into the fear, and even more dissipates. I want to be scared while writing. I want to bring it to the surface so I can banish it.
For some reason, people always assign high cheekbones to some ethnicity, but apparently by their regards, everybody on earth has high cheekbones. So I don't know if that matters.
Everybody just gets on my nerves after like, 10 minutes, you know.
I love the idea of biracial. I actually don't use the word biracial. I tend to use mixed. Biracial to me accentuates the word race, and, you know, I don't really care for it.
For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted.
If a man has ten good qualities and one bad one, to look at the ten and forget the one, and if a man has ten bad qualities and one good one, to look at the one and forget the ten.
When Nancy Reagan was newly the first lady of California, Joan Didion came and had an hour-long interview. She thought it went great, and then Joan Didion just eviscerated her in the most - possibly not inaccurate - but in the most devastating way.
Some people are cowards. . . I think by and large a third of people are villains, a third are cowards, and a third are heroes. Now, a villain and a coward can choose to be a hero, but they've got to make that choice.