Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.

Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.

Originality is unexplored territory. You get there by carrying a canoe - you can't take a taxi.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can't bring back anything to life.

Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.

Jean Paul Sartre says in "No Exit" that hell is other people. Well, our task in life is to make it heaven. Or at least earth.

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.

My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.

You are not broken and in need of fixing. You are wounded and in need of healing.

Chicago is seriously my favorite city in the country. People have roots here, which is nice. When you go to Los Angeles, no one is actually from Los Angeles.

Man never has what he wants, because what he wants is everything.

If we can't be true to ourselves, what can we be true to?

I've been excited since I received a phone call from Paul Holmgren inviting me to represent the Flyers and Flyer fans at the alumni game of the Winter Classic weekend.

I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.

I don't think there's anywhere to draw the line sexually.

In art, 'good enough' is not good enough.

The written word is redundant on the high seas. Why? Because paper gets wet too easily.