Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night.

Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.

When one writer tries to silence another, he silences every writer-and in the end he also silences himself.

I think it's very funny that someone would exaggerate to make himself look worse.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

Having reached a point in which I was so bitter and exhausted from being a quote unquote public figure, I wanted to return to a more childlike relationship to writing.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

They were good parents. The worst thing they ever did to us was die.

Do not fixate on the odds against you but on victory ahead of you.

Driving to Vegas is awesome... Driving home From Vegas sucks.

... , listening to the storm outside as it left the city, knowing that I was going to lose her but also knowing that, for a few minutes, we had belonged to one another, and to nobody else.

A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.

Women are well on the road to equality but we haven't arrived yet.

No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man. Life and death to him are haunted grounds, filled with goblin forms of vague and shadowy dread.

On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.

A man should be rugged like Steve McQueen; the way he stands, like he's ready for something. Or he should be a man of the world like Dean Martin.

In some ways, it's easier to settle for someone else's version of success than to risk falling short at one's own.

I'm really into a lot of different music, and a lot of stuff that sounds absolutely nothing like anything on the Mini-Album.