You can say you're a liberal and everybody laughs and it's a good time.

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.

It's a big world, and I really like it.

Character is that sum total of moments we can't explain.

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

Kindness, it turns out, is hard - it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, EVERYTHING.

When beauty lives in the heart, it doesn’t need to show up anywhere else.

I am not a morning person.

You can't reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.

Growing up, I was taught that a man has to defend his family. When the wolf is trying to get in, you gotta stand in the doorway.

I hang out all the time with kids and young scouts and I never meet kids who don't want adventure.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

One should refrain from contempt for the baser specimens of humanity, for whom liberation amounts to shaving the heads of women who have slept with Germans.

If fishes were wishes the ocean would be all of our desire.

When it feels scary to jump, that’s exactly when you jump. Otherwise you end up staying the same place your whole life. And that I can’t do.

Are you willing to take responsibility for your team's culture or do you treat it like the weather - something that happens to you?