Optimism is true moral courage.
I think I'm passionately allowing myself to be influenced by the things that are around me.
I think I'm a full-time artist, a full-time urban planner, and a full-time preacher with an aspiration of no longer needing any of those titles. Rather, I'm trying to do what for some seems a very messy work or a complicated work.
It's not really about the material. It's about our capacity to shape things.
I'm not a preacher, but I preach. I'm not a Buddhist, but I chant. I'm not race theorist, but I have questions and ponderances around the complexities of race and class and culture wherever I am.
Sometimes the creating that we do is creating a platform that allows other creative people to pitch in.
I believe that beauty is a basic service.
The pleasure of nonfiction is that it takes all of that sort of artistic and observational skill, but then there's a more intellectual layer on top of it: it's not enough to make us see things in new ways, we have to try to figure out what that means for the way we live.
A wedding is and event, but marriage is a life.
Do what you love and try not to look at what other people occupy themselves with.
If you do the best you can, no matter how bad the situation, you probably are going to come out okay.