I tend to keep my ideas in my head. When I write something down in a notebook it's never centralized. There are too many notebooks floating around, but maybe that's a good thing.

Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocketsized.

Some people need a huge amount of attention, and they are worthy of that attention, and they're still exhausting.

You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.

I should figure out why I'm so much more interested in doing something that I think is really hard. But, somehow, the thing that is hard for me feels more noble.

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.

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.