Learning the edges or limits or sources of friction in empathy was one of the big issues for me.

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.

I've been thinking so much about writing as a gift to readers - and how newness of subject (place or topic or person) is one of the biggest gifts at our disposal.

Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

If you were going to die, I was going to die with you. I couldn't stop thinking it over and over as you screamed, as I tried to kill her: you were my mate my mate my mate.

Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical and destructive than one, even if he be a tyrant.

We always had lutefisk for Christmas dinner, after which Dad read from the Norwegian Bible.

Diane Cluck is a virtuosic talent with an emotionality that feels at once ancient and alien. Her mastery of her voice as an ecstatic instrument is so compelling.

Iran poses the most serious long-term threat to regional stability.

There's an argument for saying that brave men deserve what they get, but it's a serious business forcing cowards to stand in harm's way.

My father said I was perfectly suited for Washington because I've always worked around nuts.

Everyone is a comedy. If people are laughing at you, they just don't quite understand the joke that is themselves.

Obligation is a flimsy base for creativity, way down the list behind passion, courage, instinct, and the desire to do something great.

I try to create songs that are really massive and intense, but at the same time remaining honest and raw.