For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive.

Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.

The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.

That's important to me, to recommend books.

Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.

If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.