You have no control [over natural disaster]. That's what's scary about it. You're helpless. That feeling of helplessness is really scary.

Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different styles.

Well, when I was 13, for my bar mitzvah I received my first typewriter. And that was special.

Many adults feel that every children's book has to teach them something.... My theory is a children's book... can be just for fun.

Sometimes it helps to scold yourself, to give yourself advice.

I feel happy to terrify kids.

When I write, I try to think back to what I was afraid of or what was scary to me, and try to put those feelings into books.

The only lesson is, you gotta keep at it.

Everything that has happened to me has been amazing and surprising.

Who is more irrational, the guy who believes in a God he can't see, or a guy who's offended by a God he doesn't believe in?

I've had a very sheltered life. What can happen to you if you stay home writing all day?

What's the world's greatest lie?... It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.

A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.

It does not matter where you are—from this very moment on you choose the direction of your life.

Music, it seemed, could appear in many voices, and had all of the emotions and array of vocabulary as a human..

When you give all your power to the powers that be, you take away the powers of thee.

Music-wise, I listen to everything. Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman, I guess I like a lot of 70's music.

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

We aren't leveraging this great economic engine, the strongest economy in the world. And yet we have this totally weak response. We import $500 billion a year more in products than we export.

The harrowing of the soul can be like the harrowing of the soil; to increase the yield, things are turned upside down.

In the mountain, stillness surges up to explore its own height In the lake, movement stands still to contemplate its own depth.