What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.

Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.

Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.

That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us

I am shedding.I am not a new me.I am my old me in my new me.I remain, carved with the soul of my knife.My mess scattered all over my countenance. I am me. Take me as I am.

Laywers, I suppose, were children once.

I was already, I think, at the age of 18, showing signs of being incompetent in the lab.

Young people these days don't trust anything at all. They want to be free.

Priesthood is forever and does not cease when a priest cannot carry out that priestly ministry.

I'm tired of malicious articles slandering me.

If we seek God for our own good and profit, we are not seeking God.