Being serious is serious business in fiction. It's commercial or hoi polloi in fiction to be funny. It's too accessible to the great unwashed.

I know what to do with my life. I just don't know what to do with this one night.

To conform is to lose your soul

It is forgivable to say nothing out of ignorance; it's inexcusable to remain silent once awareness dawns.

All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.

I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.

We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.

It is really irritating to work with irritating people

The main questions of everyday life are too enormous to answer in any definitive sense.

I wake up every day in order to do something that's quixotic, and not necessarily called for in the world, but I do it because there's extraordinary meaning for me behind the effort.

My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game.

God is light.

Gertrude’s remedy for her mood swings was to print up hundreds of black-bordered calling cards embossed with the single word “Woe, ” which she handed out gaily declaring, “Woe is me.

The reality of the building does not consist in the roof and walls but in the space within to be lived in.

I had this big thing about guitar harmonies. I wanted to be the first to put proper three-part harmonies onto a record. That was an achievement.

Comic books, if you're adapting a comic book - like X-Men, for example - you've got 40 years of amazing stories to dig into, things that incredible artists have been thinking about for decades.

The most important thing, the thing that unites all of us, is that we can INSPIRE and CHALLENGE one another TO BE BETTER.

I'm passionate about history and there's no more historic place than London. We're sitting on a thousand years of history and you can smell it as you're walking around the streets.

As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.

I am not opposed to doing a side project, like Death Cab for Cutie, where it's completely different from my own band.

Until you take charge of your own life, things don't happen.