I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.

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.

I don't think it was pain that made [Vincent Van Gogh] great - I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.

It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.

I'd put him in the spot where he got hit. It was my fault he got shot. A hundred kills? Two hundred? More? What did they mean if my brother was dead?

I like school very much, and I'll go to college if my career slows down. But kids go to college to be where I am today. Not to put college down, but for me, it would be digressing.

If something needed to be written, if something needed to be polished, needed to be re-written, I was just handed pages.

In the words of Michael Jackson: I'm a lover, not a fighter.

My mother always texts me saying 'Fighting! Do well, my handsome son!'.

On his telepathic understanding with James Worthy- It's almost like we have ESPN.

People are essentially red meat. They are.

The problem is, we have yet to convince the Taliban they are fellow passengers on spaceship Earth.