Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.

I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.

The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.

Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.

There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.

We have to admire the world for not ending on us.

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

There are plenty of other ways to mend a broken heart, and doing some list full of stuff that you don't want to do doesn't have to be one of them.

All celebrated people lose dignity on a close view.

Subsisting on a diet drawn from one food group isn't healthy or gratifying. Even eating cupcakes 24/7 eventually would get old!

One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.

People laugh to forget their troubles, and to forget their troubles they like to look at people who aren't doing better than they are.

Anger devours almost all other good emotions. It deadens the soul. It numbs the heart to joy and gratitude and hope and tenderness and compassion and kindness.

It's been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.

Mature means neither "too soon" nor "too late," but something between the two.

A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young an' believing.