It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings.

everything i know about loveis that it hurtsand is almost always never returnedthe way you want it to.but i have hopebecause i do not know everything.

Happy is very abstract, you can't touch it.

Survival is a passive way of saying “my needs are greater than yours.

I initially thought I would be an architect, maybe. So I went to architecture camp and quickly learned that I did not want to be an architect. I was like, 'No. This is not for me.'

As a musician, my job is incredibly easy, and it's a good one, but I've got to work at it occasionally.

I was interested in aerospace and flying, and the U.S. is really the best place in the world for flying.

Trouble can always be borne when it is shared.

A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction.

Friendship is higher than love. Sometimes, it's less glamorous, or less passionate, but it's deeper and kind of wiser, I think.

I've always hated narrative songs. I hate those songs where, basically, it's an unfolding of a story.