Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

Your anger against every form of insult and oppression must be out of love.

When we make the decisions to be and stay in love, we should also make a decision and commitment to be supportive.

Life there was hard and it made people hard.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

And though all streams flow from a single course to cleanse the blood from polluted hand, they hasten on their course in vain.

Sometimes minor characters are based on people I know, on friends of mine. But I'm not writing a thinly veiled version of my own life.

The gospel breathes the spirit of love. Love is the fulfilling of its precepts, the pledge of its joys, and the evidence of its power.

I think it's cool when Scorsese will pop up in a movie or something like that. I never want to make a career out of that or anything. I like directing. That's my favorite thing.

Some of the jam we thought was for tomorrow, we've already eaten

A person who complains that his children don´t treat him well, should recall how he brought them up.