Whatever we can’t hold, we hang on a hook that will hold it.

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.

I've been thinking so much about writing as a gift to readers - and how newness of subject (place or topic or person) is one of the biggest gifts at our disposal.

Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

As llamas have never heard of oxygen, they do not miss it.

Civilised my syphilised yarbles.

You can always find a stray negative comment on the Internet. It's like everybody loves to put negative comments on the Internet under the cloak of anonymity.

Live a "Why not?" life, man. Take the shot. The shot is always worth taking.

We will not let governments off the hook. We will look to civil society to help us, to pin governments, to what they have committed to here. And we will report on it.

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.

I just don't think of myself as an actor much at all, so I don't lust after any particular roles.

When a sincere woman begins to dance, the seven heavens, the earth, and all creatures begin to dance.

Play and write music the way you want the world to be.