What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

I guess my life hasn’t always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I want. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

Nice people don't necessarily fall in love with nice people.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

Knowledge is strength.

Whoever find the goodness of grace, departs from wicked acts of evil.

No two days are the same.

The statement 'the Shariah says...' is thus automatically misleading, as there is almost always more than one answer to any legal question.

Do pleasant things yourself, but unpleasant things through others.

Feel like a woman, wear a dress!

I've never met anybody who was helped by being told how wretched, miserable and sinful they are.

I sometimes don't know what songs are about for several years after I've written them.

Every day is like that, eight successive meetings on eight different topics, every one really important and interesting.

Nothing else is going to matter if we kill the earth and we kill the food and we destroy the gene pool and there aren't any people around to enjoy the earth.