My stories, I can understand them as a little toy that you wind up and you put it on the floor and it just goes under the coach. That I get. Beyond that, I'm a little lost.

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.

It's a big world, and I really like it.

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, EVERYTHING.

God rewards those who put Him first and seek to do His will.

When you're wrong, you're wrong. But when you're right, you're wrong anyhow.

Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there's always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills

Isn't it amazing how photography has advanced without improving.

Because you don’t ever find things when you’re looking for them. You find them when you’re not.” “If that were true, nobody would ever find their keys.

I didn't write the book to sell the book, but to tell my experiences.

I could definitely empathize with the character, with the feelings of helplessness - if only the desperation and the feeling of isolation.

So always keep momentum, it's this prime directive for managing a startup.

By your late thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day that it admits you.

You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write.