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 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 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.

Experience is the best school, Failures, Mistakes, Embarrassments, and Heartaches are teaching there, Offering only one lesson called Life, That you could only finish once you're dead!

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

Naturally, the human being wants to forget pain.

Within National Parks is room--glorious room--room in which to find ourselves, in which to think and hope, to dream and plan, to rest and resolve.

England is the paradise of women, the purgatory of men, and the hell of horses.

Some of my other stories are talked about as fantasy, some as horror, and some aren't talked about as genre at all. And the same story will be labeled differently depending on country.

And my parents' separation was tricky. But my mum had always been really honest with me, and treated me like an adult even when I was really young, so I knew they hadn't been getting on.

I love being vulnerable. It's scary. I feel like the best stuff that I have ever written can come from real vulnerable places.

I'd kill myself without music. Immediately. Life is pointless without music for me.

I have never regretted erring on the side of withholding information.