Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

Day will move on and live his life. So will I. We will be okay. Someday, perhaps in the far and distant future, we'll find each other again.

Every time you pray if your prayer is sincere there will be new feeling and new meaning in it which will give you fresh courage and you will understand that prayer is an education.

I suppose that it's my impulse to mine, as a writer, these scary parts of ourselves and the world.

My father builds homes. So I grew up around the idea that you can take a piece of land, and you can bulldozer it and build new homes on it. You can create something new.

Humans more easily remember or learn items when they are studied a few times over a long period of time (spaced presentation), rather than studied repeatedly in a short period of time.

Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.

Good taste has everything to do with being cultured and being refined, and if art has to do with anything, it has to do with being human.

It's easier to stand on the sidelines, criticize, and say why you shouldn't do something. The sidelines are crowded. Get in the game.

John Goodman's pretty dark - I love John Goodman.

When I got the red card all the Chelsea players come around. It felt like I had a lot of babies around me.