Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.

I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

... the more I seek, the less I find.

His parents’ pregnancies must have been all-out chromosomatic war

We cannot teach people anything we can only help them discover it within themselves.

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.

actions speak louder than words

Always be humble enough to learn something new. Otherwise, it's only a matter of time before your knowledge becomes outdated.

I think there should be bad blood between all clubs.

I'm predisposed to think that as a people, we're hardwired to understand things through the telling of stories. I think that as human beings it's part of who we are.

You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping.

Overall, I think Michael Jordan is the greatest athlete in any particular sport. He dominated the game for the Chicago Bulls and brought the NBA to its greatest peak of popularity.