I think the mission for the writer is to tell stories in a compelling way about the stuff that cannot be talked about, that cannot be gotten at with shallow media.

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

Live your life in such a way that you can say "I love my life" and really mean it.

...it is love, imperfect and unordered, that keeps them apart, even as it holds them somehow together...

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

Adjusting to Beau being a caveman over a girl had been almost as hard as seeing him with Ash. Beau didn't do jealous, not until Ashton had become his. Now he was a freaking lunatic.

Meditation means to be free from all phenomena and calmness means to be internally unperturbed. There will be calmness when one is free from external objects and is not perturbed.

In the final analysis, all explanations of meaning, various as they are, serve to indicate how something is 'appropriate' in and to our practices, our lives in effect.

Our greatest ability as humans is not to change the world; but to change ourselves.

I hope that in some way that I can be some sort of beacon of hope, especially because I am not the typical Hollywood beauty.

It's such a performance to bring stuff into America. It's a great luxury when I am in England.

A woman who wants a charitable heart wants a pure mind.