My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant - we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.

Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

When things don't go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.

Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.

I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.

Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.

A couple of them were school beauty-queen pretty while a few were that more real-looking type. A realer kind of pretty.

Do not postpone what's important to you simply because others don't share your priorities

Fate is an excuse for people who are too stupid or too weak to make their own future, " he said.

Many Africans are used to a life where they get up in the morning and don't know what they're going to do that day.

So much history can be lost if no one tells the story -- so that's what I do. I tell the stories. This is my way of fighting for social change.

In vain will you fly from one vice if in your wilfulness you embrace another.

There are certain people who have become better artists, but they're brilliant at marketing. I think someone who's been phenomenal like that is Madonna.

Businesses large and small shouldn't have to check the expiration date of a tax provision to see if it's still good.

Depression makes me hate the world, but it gives me a million things to think.