Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

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

I think you could wear a paper bag and still look good.

Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.

Welcome to the Academy Awards, or, as it's known at my house, Passover.

Yeah, it's unfair that you can get judged by something you didn't do, but it's also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn't work for.

No one can tell you what your heart should feel.

One life is an absurdly small allowance.

If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable.

It is a wry commentary on the value-system in the United States that one speaks there of "teacher training" and "driver education."

I am always thirsting for beautiful, beautiful, beautiful music. I wish I could make it. Perhaps there isn't any music on earth like what I picture to myself.

Influence is the single most important skill you can master in your lifetime.