Kafka wrote the great line: "my education has damaged me in ways I do not even know." And that's always been a signature motto for me.

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.

Is that not always the case? Given any two people in a relationship, one will always love more, the other less. Right?

A racist is just an ignorant man afraid of people who are different from him.

My mom doesn't post on Facebook, but she'll tell anyone within about the first five minutes of meeting them about my sister and I, in whatever way she can.

Those things [t hydraulic penises and prosthetic butts and all that] can be what's genuinely shocking about the movie [Swiss Army Man] because people wouldn't expect to be moved by any of it.

I get a huge energy transfusion from listening to poets read their works.

We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are still capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep - Blindness

You realize how much fun we did have, with no money at all. We'd stay in peoples' homes in Tangiers. When you're young, you invite yourself.

The truth is that she told me she couldn't love me. When she said goodbye, she was saying goodbye forever. And yet. I made myself forget. I don't know why. I keep asking myself. But I did.

I didn't understand 3-D in the fifties and I can't say I get it now either. I just don't see what the big deal is.

Every artist has a moment where they think about quitting music for a moment because its scary.