Ideologically, I have a lot of problems with that, especially when people toss around that form of story as realism. What's called "realism" is actually highly formulaic.

To make a beautiful piece means you have really witnessed it and really made decisions about it.

Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.

Follow Through is elegant, sure footed, smart—a nest of sticks that won’t stay sticks—a nest of sticks that snowballs—scary and marvelous.

You're seeing something that you've seen a thousand times and you just like it. There's nothing wrong with that but it's not a revelation. It's not a surprise. It's comfort.

I don't want to write the thing that I am a consumer of when I'm unconscious. I want to write the thing that makes me contend with the thing that I've been consuming unconsciously.

If you think it's worth writing a book about then that means you suspect that you're not the only one. You suspect that it has something to do with the larger patterns of your culture.

But even then I knew it wasn’t me that saved her life. It wasn’t about me. I was just there while she was maybe going to die and maybe not, and then she just didn’t.

Lovers have no primary needs

There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous black and dull black, black in sunlight and black in shadow.

Taxation according to income is the most effective instrument yet devised to obtain just contribution from those best able to bear it and to avoid placing onerous burdens upon the mass of our people.

What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it.

A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

The great Way is very straight, but people prefer to deviate.

I'm a Jane Austen/Jane Eyre kind of girl.

If untouchability is an integral part of Hinduism, the latter is a spent bullet.

Love is the undisturbed balance that binds this universe together.

The only parents in the world who don’t need sleep, and our child already sleeps through the night. Edward Cullen, Breaking Dawn, Chapter 22, p.429