I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn't speak for themselves.

Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.

The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.

Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.

I feel lucky for my upbringing and tremendous adversity, which made me so successful, now I like to devote my life to improve lives of others, who are facing adversity every day.

There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.

College is part of the American dream. It shouldnt be part of a financial nightmare for families

All music is devotional, whether it's devotion to products, face washes, creams, plastic. Everybody is devoted to something.

The challenge is to find our destiny in exactly what we are refusing to engage in.

If it brings me to my knees, it's a bad religion

Oon ere it herde, at tother out it went.

You are not a soul, you are not a mind, you are not a body. You are the controller of all three.

I love titles and organizing chains of ideas. I like that very much.

I hope to goodness I would not still be working in the corporate world - the money is OK but it is no life at all.