“The fact of the matter is, you don't give up what's natural. Anything I've fantasized about, I've done.”

“Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do. I've never had a feeling in my life. As a matter of fact, I matter only with earth people.”

“I'm not ashamed of anything I've done.
Shame is a useless emotion.”

“I churched it and churched it. I got born again, slowly. I've slid back several times, but it seemed like it don't matter. God will give you seven times 70 a chance. I've pushed it to the limit a time or two.”

“"What's wrong - what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for…”

“I have this kind of philosophy that I can't do anything about what happened yesterday, or what's going to happen tomorrow. But I feel in full control of what's going on now. I think worry will make you sick. I've never seen it accomplish anything. I've never seen worrying about anything change it. So I decided not to do it. If you can't do anything about it, why in the hell worry about it? Every negative thought you have releases poison into your system, and will kill you or give you cancer, or tumors or whatever else you can think of. So if you are thinking negative about anything, erase that.”

“The saddest people I've met in my life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all.”

“.. As a matter of fact, last winter I was painting on ivory; I've already got a collection of forty studies, but these are original miniatures, of a kind I've never seen before, entirely done with the point of a brush, with details that are closer to the brushwork of Velásquez than to that of Mengs.”

“My dear young cousin, if there's one thing I've learned over the eons, it's that you can't give up on your family, no matter how tempting they make it.”

“I don't think I'm easy to talk about. I've got a very irregular head. And I'm not anything that you think I am anyway.”