I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.

It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it.

I could teach. I could wait tables. I could cook in a restaurant. Food and teaching were the two skills I had.

I really do think that our subconscious gets corrupted with fear, and fear is how news media - all media - makes us [watch] long enough to get to the Tide commercial. That's all it's about. Generating fear so that we can buy the proper laundry detergent.

shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us

Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.