Readers and writers are united in their need for solitude, in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness.

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

We are treated different because we want to be treated different.

Courage originally meant "To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart.

Everyone— black as well as white— thinks it's going to be better over the next jump of land.

The world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity's captive.

All human things Of dearest value hang on slender strings.

Exposure to a diversity of disciplines has been exceptionally helpful to me.

I'm pretty athletic and I play basketball a lot.

It's been a lifetime of trying to have less beef. Beef comes very naturally to me. I was born with my dukes up, but that's not always necessary anymore. I have to retrain myself.

And if we can accept that a mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?