Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.

You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.

These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.

I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.