You're either reading a book or you're not.

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

You give me the duty to write about love

You get lucky when you are well prepared for the opportunity.

Be good to yourself.

No doubt, the biggest challenge before you is to protect yourself from sadness, because happiness belongs to the theory of uncertainty.

It is true that a fellow cannot ignore women - but he can think of them as he ought - as sisters, not as sparring partners.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

No life of faith can be lived privately. There must be overflow into the lives of others.

Enjoyment and innocence are the most bashful things: both do not want to be sought.

Well, look at all of these summer blockbusters. You can't help but laugh a little, because you've already seen a lot of these movies 482 times.

We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.