The truth of the matter is that the people who succeed in the arts most often are the people who get up again after getting knocked down. Persistence is critical.

The prosecutor, who is supposed to carry the burden of proof, really is an author.

I cannot think of a day in my life when the library didn’t exert a potent attraction for me, offering a sense of the specialness of each individual’s curiosity and his or her quest to satisfy it.

Nobody ever gets what they want when it comes to love.

What kills a person at twenty-five? Leukemia. An accident. But George knows the better odds are that someone who passes at that age dies of unhappiness. Drug overdose. Suicide. Reckless behavior.

Widespread public access to knowledge, like public education, is one of the pillars of our democracy, a guarantee that we can maintain a well-informed citizenry.

I count myself as one of millions of Americans whose life simply would not be the same without the libraries that supported my learning.

Life is simply experience; for reasons not readily discerned, we attempt to go on.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

'Torts' more or less means 'wrongs'...One of my friends said that Torts is the course which proves that your mother was right.

Who are we but the stories we tell about ourselves, particularly if we accept them?

In other circumstances, Ivan might have offered him a job. Sadly, with a few notable meta exceptions, dead men didn’t code very well.

But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone. ~pg 254

Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men's magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.

I really do want to have a child.

It make one's mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment.

I definitely see the voice as an instrument: It makes great drums, great synth pads, great everything.

I want to keep looking at ways to stride forward with positivity.

The story has to flow from an unstructured, felt place, but then I have to bring my analytical brain to bear on issues of craft.

The biggest barrier to starting a company isn't ideas, funding or experiences. It's excuses.

If I had all the money in the world, I'd be like, "Great, let's just keep doing it!" I, unfortunately, have not won the lottery or found the magic genie lamp.