I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog-that becomes the Christmas ham.

Sometimes you're sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they're only their simple, goofy selves.

The most revolutionary statement in history is "Love thine enemy

I need to go play football. I don't care about anything else.

I never make a film with a message in mind. I'm more interested in the characters; how they are related to each other and the situation they're in.

I just love to fight. I like to hurt people. I haven't lost that. I didn't lose it when I first got a bit of wealth and I haven't lost it now. The nature of my business is to hurt people.

I'm just saying that there are high quality materials, and when we change them then there should be a way of changing them so that you can celebrate that change - rather than just 'mix it up'.

The expression "from above" is for us only a way of speaking. Many receive from above the command for action - we call it intuition.

Put First Things First! These four words cover an entire philosophy which can be applied with profit by every business leader, by every executive and by every employee.

I've always been opposed myself to prisoners having the vote.