I'm a private person, a shy person. Sometimes, reading for eleven hours straight feels to me like the perfect way to spend a day.

As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.

Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.

Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.

Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.

I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.

A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly.

Though her emotions had not deviated from a jittery frailty she knew that in her own room she could at least attempt sleep and that if she dreamed she might then finally be with Henry.

All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.

When it comes to me, I just write the most beautiful music I can, I do the best work I can, and then I hand it out there.

I think it's interesting being American, the expectations for an American guy, and the image that has to be projected. 'Oh, I can't wear pink,' that kind of stuff. There's none of that in Europe.

I love the Arctic Monkeys . Who doesn't? I'd love to see them live, but haven't got round to it yet. I never get to see bands because I'm never in the same town for more than two seconds.

I believe that everyone has some huge talent in them; the really lucky ones discover what it is.

Conceit is incompatible with understanding.

You can't judge a character that you're playing, because then you're fighting against doing what the character's doing.

Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.