I like thinking of the writer as a kind of curator; the collection as curiosity cabinet - in a non-demeaning, non-objectifying sense - but an array, a set of offerings.

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.

Service to God is largely unacceptable without service to men

In soul of every newborn baby, words are waiting to be written.

I suppose it's something to do with her black-brained religion not to take care of the body.

I just want to sing, I want to work on my music, I want to make my movies, that's all I want to do.

There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born.

I don't shop because I need something, I just shop for shopping's sake.

I like my customer to be fierce.

What every Englishman thinks about patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a brain in your nineties. If you keep it fed and interested, you'll find it lasts you very well.

In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.