All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren't they?

I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.

If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.

But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It's a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life's manifold complexities—its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us.

Tragedy is one of the larger prices we pay for being alive. No one ever sidesteps tragedy. It is always there, shadowing us.

From Graham Greene, I learnt how to be an accessible writer who grapples with our doubts as sentient individuals.

We all talk about how much we hate lies. Yet we prefer, so often, to be lied to....because it allows us to dodge all those painful truths we'd rather not hear.