All the world's a stage we're going through.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

When you love someone you let them take care of you.

People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people uses every day, like: 'Be realistic!'" (2009)]

If we pick recognition over influence we'll be known for all the wrong stuff.

There's a great appetite for smart television. Every day I get up and there are interesting stories I want to do.

I have a lot of fruit trees and my own little vegetable garden and chickens. And every time I eat, I bless my food; I say I'm grateful for for it and let it nourish every part of my body.

Mediocrity is excellent to the eyes of mediocre people.

With the advent of DNA, we know that people have been convicted and sentenced to death who later proved not to be guilty of the crime.

The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.

I have enough to think about - I just don't ever want to have to think about my car.

It's the discipline to understand that the things that might make you rich or things might make you famous are sometimes worth pursuing and sometimes are not.