I feel that losing both my legs was a blessing. It was meant to happen to me: I wouldn't have had the opportunity to touch so many lives in such a positive way.

What snowboarding has always had and the Olympics has not touched is that spirit, that original spirit of creativity and athletes standing up and having a voice and being innovative. But I guess what the Olympics has done is provided a platform for that spirit, and that's what I see as being a really positive thing.

Winning is fun, but those moments that you can touch someone's life in a very positive way are better.

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.

When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself - less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive - less prose, more poetry.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

My pet peeves are people touching me a lot. Random dudes grabbing me and slapping me across the back. They're not doing it on purpose, but it's like they forget I'm a person. But you can't do anything about it. What are you going to do?

The kinds of roles dogs fill can be hard to come by in human relationships. We touch the dog or the pet at whim. There is a lack of self-consciousness and a fluidity to it that is absent from most human relationships. If someone acted that way to you, you'd feel claustrophobic pretty quickly. It's a boundary violation.

Pet me, touch me, love me, that's what I get when I perform. That's when I'm really getting what I want.

I have felt cats rubbing their faces against mine and touching my cheek with claws carefully sheathed. These things, to me, are expressions of love.

I've no patience for people who say they never watch television. It's a great way to keep in touch with popular culture, and it's important that children can relate to what their schoolmates are watching.

I don't even drink! I can't stand the taste of alcohol. Every New Year's Eve I try one drink and every time it makes me feel sick. So I don't touch booze - I'm always the designated driver.

The mystic cords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the angels of our nature.

And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.

I'm always going to be able to touch fans and get new fans because everybody goes through something everyday. I just keep touching different subjects by talking to the streets and reaching out to my fans by telling them a story instead of just giving them music to listen.

Soul music is about longevity and reaching and touching people on a human level - and that's never going to get lost.

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.