The most purely autobiographical ­fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto­biographical story than "The Meta­morphosis".

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

The more dysfunctional, the more some family members seek to control the behavior of others.

There are some days we can claim and there are other days that claim us.

Love is an energy to which we all must tune it. There is no greater power Source.

I have memories of the clearest crystal mountain days imaginable, when we fortunates in the height seemed to be sky people living in light alone.

Many of the cognitive enhancement drugs serve to increase focus and concentration. But 'letting your mind wander' is very often an important part of the creative process.

I want to race as long as I'm having fun, it's competitive and healthy, and who knows when that, you know, date comes when that's not happening anymore.

Human passions unbridled by morality and religion...would break the stronges cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.

I wanted so much to keep you safe. I did my best. I'm sorry things didn't come out different for the two of us. I wish I could have been good enough for you.

Kittens play with yarn, they bat it around. What they're really doing is saying, "I can't knit, get this away from me!"

My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne.