Ma's still nodding. "You're the one who matters, though. Just you." I shake my head till it's wobbling because there's no just me.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.

The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it's going to be the next minute.

Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.

I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened.

It’s called mind over matter. If we don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” When a bit of me hurts, I always mind.

Books are the air I breathe, so I don't notice the seasons.

If I was made of cake I'd eat myself before somebody else could.

I remember manners, that's when people are scared to make other persons mad.

When I tell her what I’m thinking and she tells me what she’s thinking, our each ideas jumping into the other’s head, like coulouring blue crayon on top of yellow that makes green.

Stories are a different kind of true.

Sleep is a mirror of life in which can be seen the reflection of death.

She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world.

For me, it's important that I experience and feel what the characters are feeling. So I put myself in those moments, in their thoughts, and let it happen naturally. I write what I feel.

Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.

Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

Drumming was the only thing I was ever good at.

You don't have to write like David Foster Wallace or James Baldwin or Maggie Nelson - indeed, you shouldn't. Those writers are doing it better than you ever could.

You can't make a movie for everybody. You can't go into it trying to alienate people, but you have to assume that you're going to.

I want to be in cahoots with bands who want to make the record of their dreams.

The surest way to lose sight of who you are is to constantly compare yourself to others.