Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

You have to have a plot too, you know? Because without it, your life is less of a story and more of an empty paper.

...And nostalgia is a cancer. Nostalgia will fill your heart up with tumors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you are. You're just an old fart dying of terminal nostalgia.

Slater soaks into the mind as water into low and marshy places, where it becomes stagnant and offensive.

I'm 36, and sometimes I'm working so hard I don't realize how much I've gotten done.

I collect ex-boyfriends -- and more than five, at last count.

It's not how big you are, it's how big you play.

He became fubar in the classic way, which is to say that he was the victim of a temporary arrangement that became permanent.

I have always believed that I could help change the world, because I have been lucky to have adults around me who did.

I just got Kill Bill: Vol. 2. I've watched it like eight times in the past two months. I just love the scene at the end between David Carradine and Uma Thurman.

One of the soundest rules to remember when making forecasts in the field of economics is that whatever is to happen is happening already.