In America now there is this phenomenon called helicopter parenting, where you're hovering over your child for the whole time. Parents there view their job as being to make sure their kid never has a moment of unhappiness. Of course, as a parent myself, I can understand the urge, but I don't know whether it would be healthy or possible.

The smell of cooking food is often a calming one.

We laughed the rest of the way, because the point of this story is, it is not the cookies. It is the love.

The Long Goodbye' is one book I like to read over and over again, and it was an enormous inspiration for 'All The Wrong Questions'.

It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes, it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.

There is no worse sound in the world than someone who cannot play the violin but insists on doing so anyway.

I was not a particularly brave child, I think, because I had a narrative mind, because my mind automatically went to any terrible thing that could happen.