It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn't had any cigarettes.

Confidence is a reduction of your own interest in whether others are thinking about you and if so, what they're thinking.

When you have your health, you have everything. When you do not have your health, nothing else matters at all.

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

I can't tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it's something I never felt a part of. I've always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere.

This is what happens when you go against the grain of truth. You get splinters later on.

I feel like they are two different things, and when I write books, they're just books. If they can be movies that's okay. But I would write a novel that couldn't be a film.