The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.

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

Max, you're the last of the hybrids who still has...a soul.' ... 'She doesn't have soul, ' Gazzy scoffed. 'Have you ever seen her dance?

Killing people isn't progress.

When you're given something new, it's always exciting 'cause you're the first one to do it. You're not having to live up to any expectations, or be compared to anyone who's ever done it before.

There are persons who always find a hair in their plate of soup for the simple reason that, when they sit down before it, they shake their heads until one falls in.

I just love to make a whole roomful of people laugh.

To fly up to the sky and watch the earth is beautiful; to fly down to the earth and watch the sky is even more beautiful!

Like the children we will never ever cease to be.

I have a great office.

I am ugly but what I do have is charm.

The only time I've really been away from my kids to do work was doing Shall We Dance because they both were in camp and it was the first time in twenty years that I haven't been with my kids.