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.

You are the same person in every aspect of your life, and you have to be a responsible person in every aspect of your life.

We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.

No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do

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

It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.

The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.