Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.

What kind of a stage should we attain? One where our intellect becomes such that it never creates conflict within our home. Everything else is acceptable but there must never be any inner conflict.

If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old.

But games always cover something deep and intense, else there would be no excitement in them, no pleasure, no power to stir us.

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.

Human beings, from their own point of view, are very different than what people see.

I've done a little yoga, not as a professional, and every time I have a good teacher I see the immense possibilities and subtleties in this discipline. It's a little bit like music.

I do enjoy wearing a little heel when I'm at work, but when I'm running around with my son, it's a different story!

I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay.

If I feel like doing something, I do it. If I feel like saying something, I say it. If I feel like dancing, I do. If I don't, I don't.