You should think of your energy as if it’s expensive, as if it’s a luxury item. Not everyone can afford it. Not everyone has invested in you in order to be able to have the capital for you to care about this. What you spend your energy on, that’s the day.
New Heights podcast, August 13, 2025.
Luckily, I’m blessed with a well-developed sense of absurdity—it’s what saved me.
Calvin Tompkins, “No More Boring Art: John Baldessari’s Crusade,” The New Yorker, October 18, 2010, 42–49.
I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.
Empathy Exams (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014), 23.
Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself…
Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959 ), 12.
The sooner you establish a routine, the more smoothly your collaboration will advance.
The Collaborative Habit, written with Jesse Kornbluth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 26.
Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
East of Eden (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 73.
Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 2.
I put my faith in therapy as others do in religion, or philosophy.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 175.
Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off.
Lit (New York: Harper, 2009), 59.
If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.
Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), 41.
I seem to spend my life missing you.
Letter to Elizabeth Bishop, Nov. 10, 1969, reprinted in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 655.
I would rather be excused from your banquet of happiness.
The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1917), 153.