Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now and I think like where will I be standing when I look back Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or... or what

I was a stepchild in two different families. The hardest thing about being a stepchild is you know that in some way everything would be easier if you didnt exist.

If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.

Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.

Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.

Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.

Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work.

I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.

The answers were maddeningly absent—it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.

Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.

A fellowship of secret scholars spent five hundred years on this task. Now we're penciling it in for a Friday morning.

If we strive for goals, relishing in the pleasure of circumstance, nothing is enjoyable, and life becomes purposeless.

In the birth of societies it is the chiefs of states who give it its special character; and afterward it is this special character that forms the chiefs of state.

But if everybody's trying to stay safe, then you never really create something new and different and surprising.

I've always wanted to do something where I aged a lot, went from young girl to dowager.

I do not need help destroying my relationship. I was raised by my father. I've completed a thirty-year seminar on the power of destroying relationships.

As I was coming up in business, screwing up was not an option in any form.

For a man's counsel cannot have equal weight or worth, when he alone has no children to risk in the general danger.

Artspeak is an arcane writing style that can result in a vocabulary of obscurities... Today, some of the more spectacular examples are in artist's statements.