Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

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.

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

If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.

You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

Partial education throughout the world is far worse than none at all if we educate the mind but not the soul.

My new movie, Fools Rush In, is a romantic comedy and the girl I play in that is very warm, very sweet.

There is a difference between knowing what is true and knowing why it is true

I don't really see the hurdles. I sense them like a memory.

Everybody knew that books were dangerous. Read the wrong book, it was said, and the words crawled around your brain on black legs and drove you mad, wicked mad.

You've got to have the guts to not be afraid to screw up. The guys who win are the ones who are not afraid to mess up. And that comes right from the heart.

There must be every kind of books in your library. The most beautiful gardens are those with many different flowers, with all kinds of herbs and weeds!

Our efforts to help the poor does not mean we're going to eradicate poverty.