You don't want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can't fill up when you're holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water - just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness.

If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses dont go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.

Feeding a baby is like filling a hole with putty - you get it in and then you sort of shave off all the excess around the hole and get it back in, like you're spackling.

You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t.

Charles had once remarked that holding onto a resentment was like eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.

Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.)