The thing about the Internet is that you can write something... for a very narrow audience and make a living at it.

But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.

Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out.

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

You don't use science to show you're right, you use science to become right.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.

The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.

Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.

If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point.

You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.

I guess a bit part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

Temptation is a strong weapon that Satan uses against the children of God

I travel a lot and rarely make it home to Seattle.

I really love doing yoga. My main ritual is yoga. I do A LOT of yoga

The only past which endures lies wordlessly within you.

The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism.

As an actor you accept that you have to publicise what you do, but as for the whole personal life thing that people sometimes choose, no, that's not for me.

We're news junkies in my house.

In terms of the creative side of it, it's really been a thing where you come up with the funny stuff is usually at a bar or out talking to people or whatever.

The piecemeal criticism which, like the fly, scans only the edge of a plinth in the great edifice upon which it crawls, disappears under a criticism that is all-comprehending and all-surveying.