The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.

I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

[I remember going] to a hotel gym at six o'clock in the morning, and the television was on, and it's some drama in which two men have clearly kidnapped a woman. They're interrogating her, and they put a plastic bag over her head. They're suffocating her, and I'm thinking, It's six o'clock in the morning! Why does anybody need to see this? How can I find the off switch?

Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.

I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.

One must not be shy where language is concerned.

But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.