Joseph O'Neill Quotes

When I was 18, I was moving to New York to start college at The New School. I had done a year of college in Toronto and wasn't happy there. I didn't have any friends in New York City, but I applied and got in. It was pretty overwhelming, but everyone in New York is so ambitious and creative.

When I finished touring 'Fur and Gold,' I was just like, 'What am I doing? What do I have? Where is my home?' I didn't really know where it was, so I went to New York to try and make it there.

I don't think I found my voice until I reached New York. I suppose it's possible I would have had some kind of different literary career if I had not discovered New York.

I didn't fit in on any level when I moved from Brooklyn to Burbank - on any level. And then I met a bunch of hippies, and I became a little hippie myself. A Brooklyn hippie.

In my early shows, I wanted to put myself through a new childhood, disintegrating my whole identity to let the real one emerge.

I was fairly young when we moved to Santa Fe, but it wasn't long after that I started to figure out who I was, and that entire process took place in this city.

In my first few years of being in New York, I had a major identity crisis because I'd never stayed in one place for so long.

Without New York, I wouldn't be the person I am today.

If I'm in LA, I'm close to home, and that just brings up all these other things, good and bad. There is a reason why I am not there. That's what I have to remind myself of. But I'm healthier in California, probably a little happier, maybe. I forget how beautiful and calm California is. It's not so much about the place, but also the age that I came to the place and, well, other things. New York is hard.

So this was what it felt like to lose yourself. Again. To let go of your future and let it rise up and up until finally you couldn't see it anymore, and you knew that you had to start over.

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.

I ain't never found no place for me to fit. Seem like all I do is start over. It ain't nothing to find no starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself.

I peeled off La Brea and went home and instantly made a reservation to come back to New York. Essentially, I fired everybody that was in my life, my agent, my lawyer, my manager, my girlfriend and came back to New York.

Everything changes radically from the moment you know yourself as being sent into this world.

Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.

But we've all ended up giving body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who's becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again.

I couldn't wait to come to New York to reinvent myself.

There's a reason why she left them, Lauren," he says. His voice is deep, and it rumbles. "What's your name?" "Um..." I don't know why I hesitate. But "Beatrice" just doesn't sound right anymore. "Think about it," he says, a faint smile curling his lips. " You don't get to pick again." A new place, a new name. I can be remade here. "Tris," I say firmly.

Eventually, the Gray Man thought, if he resisted using it for long enough, he himself might forget his own name, and became someone else entirely.

It's unbecoming," she agreed. "A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un.

Maybe I’ll come back as somebody else. I’ll be the wild-haired girl Adam meets in his first week at university. ‘Hi, are you on the horticultural course as well?

i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft

Watch yourself. Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin fresh.

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.