My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

Every day I try to do breathing exercises meditation and yoga. These things sound awfully cliche but they help me slow down and try to point to a truth.

I was in the studio so much it was about the search for air in a metaphoric sense and the breathing has more to do with travel for me about the search musically for open air.

Dealing with global warming doesn't mean we have all got to suddenly stop breathing. Dealing with global warming means that we have to stop waste and if you travel for no reason whatsoever that is a waste.

I'm thankful to be breathing on this side of the grass. Whatever comes comes.

But with exquisite breathing you smile with satisfaction of love And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.

My sense of religion is Einstein's sense of relativity. I don't believe in God. I believe that energy never dies. So the possibility exists that you might be breathing in some other form of Moses or Buddha or Muhammad or Bobby Kennedy or Roosevelt or Martin Luther King or Jesus.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate or just never come back I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much and so I just went.

Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile then the world will not have peace. It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace. It is with our capacity of smiling breathing and being peace that we can make peace.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time which gives him leisure to contrive and furnishes as ability to execute military plans.