If you want to be good, all you've got to do is be good.

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.

It's a big world, and I really like it.

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, EVERYTHING.

all my life i have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper just running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something.

I express things through characters because I have a fear that my own voice is irritating because that's been said to me.

No one yet knows what a man's province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.

I feel sad that we have allowed these knee-jerk feminists who want to act like it's a struggle against men...but again that's the least politically developed strand of feminism.

I am such a bossy producer and such a control freak that there's a part of me that really longs to be bossed around.

I must keep on rowing, not until I reach port but until I reach my grave.

The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.

Those who have to ask if faith is true are opening up a discussion they may not be ready for.

I don't concede it at all that the intelligence at the time was wrong.