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.

I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.

The choice of life is not between fame and fortune, nor wealth and poverty, but between good and evil.

If you listen to old Jerry Lee Lewis records, he'll always - about nine times out of 10 have the lyrics different than the original record is.

If hard work is the key to success, most people would rather pick the lock.

There is a lovely root to the word humiliation - from the latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returning to the ground of our being.

I don't know nothing about the sport. Just tune in August 28th and y'all find out how much I know about the sport.

Writing novels is a way of living alternative lives.

Whatever the deal is with other countries, we want a better deal for America's workers.

Love is the only channel for a clear communication.

In previous armies, soldiers used their time to clean their weapons and stock up on ammunition. Our weapons are words, and we may need our arsenal at any moment.

To know life, one must love many things.