I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I'd lose my mind.

I went to public school all my life and all through college and I liked it.

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.

You can't ever guess at life, at pain. All pain is real, and all pain is personal. It's the most personal thing we have. It eats each of us differently.

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

And there is a chance that everything we did was incorrect, but stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

We see the beauty within and cannot say no.