I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

Genius is both the sail and the wind

I was in a bar and I said to a friend, 'You know, we've become those 40-year-old guys we used to look at and say, 'Isn't it sad?'

The things that make us sad, the things that make us righteously angry, or the things we care about that others don’t are often a key that unlocks our reason for living. It’s our burden.

If you do something with your whole heart and it's a mistake, you can live with that.

Be careful. Everything you say, every single day, may be recorded in your students’ hearts forever.

You have never had fair press in America.

You know, people talk about [Richard] Nixon's "madman theory." We don't really know much about that. It was in memoirs, by somebody else.

We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

Writing is my shelter. I don't hide behind the words; I use them to dig inside my heart to find the truth.

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.