I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.

What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it?

children need love most when they don't deserve it

You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

And it was a very, very fruitful and great relationship between the Stones and The Beatles. It was very, very friendly.

Few enjoy noisy overcrowded functions. But they are a gesture of goodwill on the part of host or hostess, and also on the part of guests who submit to them.

The more you know about how things are the less you know about how things could be.

I don't pick on anybody who has a number above 30.

My actual intake of different substances was far below what people thought it was, no matter how weird or outrageous they think I am

Why blame the dark for being dark? It is far more helpful to ask why the light isn’t as bright as it could be.