Loneliness is just a thing that I'm not personally interested in. So far, it hasn't been on my docket of things to write about.

I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often.

And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.

When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.

Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.

We have no choice. We need the communion of souls and only here are they awake.

I see colors like you hear jet planes.