Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives.

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.

It's a big world, and I really like it.

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, EVERYTHING.

Success is the bridge between insanity and credibility.

Normal, average and ordinary are not a part of my vocabulary. I am an artist after all!

Google is so big you have no idea what a given person does.

It's easy to see that two people might come up with that same idea.

Bigotry and hatred and prejudice rise and fall depending on certain situations.

There's nothing more creative I'll ever do in my career than trying to make an hour of TV everyday.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

If you're going to change things, one of the things we had to change is to get away from that traditional model of rock music, and we were a part of that.

Some tribes of birds will relieve and rear up the young and helpless, of their own and other tribes, when abandoned.

God is like the sun. When the sun shines, it shines for everyone. God is for everyone.