Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.

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.

I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.

I'm only telling you on the truth," he said. "If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.

Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.

I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.

I want the younger writer to know that she or he is meaningful, that what they have to say is powerful in this world. But they can't come indoors, they can't close the curtains, they can't, like, lock themselves away from the world and say nothing.