I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

Boring people don't know they're boring. That's the problem with boring people.

I'm trying always to leave out what I think is extraneous. And to find what I think is the most wonderful language to make a beautiful sentence.

I think it's true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don't understand what people are going through.

I'm the author of my own misery.

I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.

It's not the writer who determines how good she is anyway. Writers don't determine that. It's readers who determine that.

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

Without curiosity a writer is dead.

This is just the way life is – sometimes cruel, sometimes beautiful, all the time confusing and frightening and exhilarating – and we just have to deal with it. That’swhat freedom is.

People are just trying to work their jobs, raise their families, discipline their kids, and have a good life... Politics has just become like bad weather. And they deserve clear skies.

Unless women are prepared to fight politically they must be content to be ignored politically.

Future success is dependent upon and inseparable from the consciousness out of which the actions emanate

Maybe Radiohead and R.E.M. Even a group like the National - artists who have crossed over without compromising. It's a special thing.

I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say.

The theological virtue of charity is the mysterious power, communicated by grace, to love as God loves.

Me and hip-hop have a relationship that has nothing to do with no other rapper, no matter where you from or nothing. Every n*gga got his own personal relationship with hip-hop and this is mine.

If you can't do it with feeling - don't.

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits: This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid. Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.