Because there is no meaning to be found in the arbitrary nature of things., It's all random. Just as space is blue. And birds fly through it.

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

We don't like admitting this, but it is a key component of human existence: the fact that life has the potential for things both wondrous and horrific.

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.

There is much to be said for solitude.