There is always room for at least two truths.

...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.

I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life itself.

If you have a structure beforehand, you're sort of stuffing your story into a pre-assembled box. You don't want that to happen. What you want in your writing is to have a sort of wildness that occurs. And then, out of the wildness, a structure emerges.

He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.

Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.