Perhaps if we say it straight, we suspect, if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we'll find we're nothing but banal.

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.

I've been thinking so much about writing as a gift to readers - and how newness of subject (place or topic or person) is one of the biggest gifts at our disposal.

Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.

If you commit to giving more time than you have to spend, you will constantly be running from time debt collectors.

As I tell my children, 'If you are going to do something, do your best while you're doing it.

I think that the growing government control of the press is very clear. Turkey is still not a dictatorship, there is still some freedom of the press, but I think it's moving in the wrong direction.

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.

Bill Cosby is one of America's most successful black performers.

Find somebody else to run your business on a day-to-day basis.

Once you stop looking for a job, you are no longer considered part of the unemployment number.

I wouldn't mind doing more in the kid's world because I think that might be just where I can be most useful to society, to the planet, if I can speak to children.