"Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?"

"You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night."

"Somehow it helps just to take something that's internal and externalize it, to see it in front of you."

"When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It's almost theatrical."

"The best thing is when you hear somebody take your song and make something great of it."

"I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die."

"Americans work a long away ahead of themselves because of the size of the place. To make any impact at all you have to promote yourself with live performances ages before a release."

"You will be what you will to be."

"American stuntmen are smart - they think about safety. When they do a jump in a car, they calculate everything: the speed, the distance... But in Hong Kong, we don't know how to count. Everything we do is a guess. If you've got the guts, you do it. All of my stuntmen have gotten hurt."

"Do not let circumstances control you. You change your circumstances."

"That's the unwritten rule in hip-hop. If I get on a record with you, I want to smash you. That's it. Every MC knows that. If I'm on a track with you, I want to be the best on the track. That's just how it is in hip-hop."

"I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they’re always being perverty when I’m around."

"How old are you? I asked her. "Old enough to know better." she said."

"Did you ever get fed up?' I said. 'I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?"

"Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find."

"Maybe you have to become a mother to get to the real sense of everything. Or a prostitute."

"You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before"

"Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story."

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler."

"You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."

"Without this kickstart to my day, I'd be lost. A day without a morning run is a day you fumble through, rather than one you attack."

"I wouldn't care about hurting myself or anybody else. Because I know now that doing things doesn't hurt you; you get hurt by avoiding them"

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

"Now, for the first time, he's seeing that there really is a way out of this, and it's all so simple. You don't have to run away. You just meet somebody special and step sideways into a parallel universe."