Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you’re a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence.

I wanted to be a visual artist, but I realized I was more affected by what I read than by what I saw. I would go to a show at a museum and look at a painting and say, 'Oh I wish I owned that,' and that would be the end of my relationship with a painting. With a short story I would read or with an author I would discover I could be haunted. It would affect my mood and affect the way that I saw the world. I thought, wow, it would be amazing to be able to do that.

The humor section is the last place an author wants to be. They put your stuff next to collections of Cathy cartoons.

Humor is necessary - it allows the reader to come up for air before dunking them under again. I need humor and I need it on the page to keep the reader going.

I'm not afraid to write about madness. I always figure that whatever most embarrasses you is something that everyone can relate to, really...because we're just not that different. So if you think, 'Oh my god, this is so embarrassing. I can't possibly talk about that,' and you write about it, the audience is gonna be like, 'that happened to me!

there's a reason regular people don't appear on TV: we're boring.