To make a beautiful piece means you have really witnessed it and really made decisions about it.

Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.

Follow Through is elegant, sure footed, smart—a nest of sticks that won’t stay sticks—a nest of sticks that snowballs—scary and marvelous.

Ideologically, I have a lot of problems with that, especially when people toss around that form of story as realism. What's called "realism" is actually highly formulaic.

You're seeing something that you've seen a thousand times and you just like it. There's nothing wrong with that but it's not a revelation. It's not a surprise. It's comfort.

I don't want to write the thing that I am a consumer of when I'm unconscious. I want to write the thing that makes me contend with the thing that I've been consuming unconsciously.

If you think it's worth writing a book about then that means you suspect that you're not the only one. You suspect that it has something to do with the larger patterns of your culture.

But even then I knew it wasn’t me that saved her life. It wasn’t about me. I was just there while she was maybe going to die and maybe not, and then she just didn’t.

I do not like to be unkind.

Narrow souls I cannot abide; There's almost no good or evil inside

It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.

If it matters, it produces controversy.

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.

I love Merion and I don't even know her last name.

Brown for first course, white for pudding. Brown's savoury, white's the treat. Of course I'm the one who's laughing because I actually love brown toast.

The heart will turn to a prune if love is always by the numbers. How will you know if someone really loves you if they only meet your expectations and not your needs?

Stand as a rock; you are indestructible. You are the Self (atman), the God of the universe.