It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

There is love in everything, and when we really live and view life with an open heart (and live in our truth), the light illuminates the way.

I think it would shock most people if they really knew what we have each survived by the time we graduate high school.

But such a person also has that annoying voice in the back of her head constantly reminding her that merely "coasting by" in life isn't an accomplishment.

No man who has not sat in the assemblies of men can know the light odd and uncertain ways in which decisions are often arrived at.

When I was little, I saw the play 'Les Miserables' on Broadway, I thought it was the most amazing thing I have ever seen.

I got arrested for graffiti. I got arrested - a lot of, like, underage drinking, drunk in public, shoplifting, you know, your various, like, suburban arrests, I guess.

If our worship isn't visible, comprehensive and extravagant, the gospel we heard must have been tiny, empty and cheap.

Wine is earth's answer to the sun.

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

Think of it as your ticket to change the world.