When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.

I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

People who are hard on others are usually very hard on themselves, and the pain they inflict on others is a reflection of the pain they inflict on themselves.

A cup to the dead already - Hurrah for the next that dies.

The emotions must be called upon to give feeling to the thought so that it will take form.

When you want this thing as bad as you want to breathe! That's when you find a way!

Descartes's epistemology is a special case of Aristotle's virtue ethics.

I'm sure that being sober all these years accounts for my ill humor.

The glasses were half full, which meant that the guests were completely so

I don't like to compare things to other things. It always sounds arrogant in print.

The people who get the ability to use force have to be watched carefully by civilians to make sure they don't use it excessively.

When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.