The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.

Trust yourself. It's Sugar's golden rule. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

You loathe yourself, and yet you're consumed by the grandiose ideas you have about your own importance. You're up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done.

Dear Sugar, WTF, WTF, WTF? I'm asking this question as it applies to everything every day. Best, WTF

Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it. Yours, Sugar

Compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.

There's a line by the Italian writer Carlo Levi that I think is apt here: "The future has an ancient heart." I love it because it expresses with such grace and economy what is certainly true--that who we become is born of who we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we've yet to make manifest in our lives.

There is no why. You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding.

It's about the down-in-the-dirt art of inhabiting the person you aspire to be while carrying on your shoulders the uncertain and hungry man you know you are.

Thinking deeply about your choices and actions from the stance of your future self can serve as both a motivational and a corrective force. It can help you stay true to who you really are as well as inspire you to leverage your desires against your fears. Not regretting it later is the reason I've done at least three-quarters of the best things in my life.

The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives.

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to you to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you.