If you at least try to do the things that excite you, it will make you a more expansive and present person - you’ll feel, at the end of your life, that at least you took the shot.

In a certain way, we're always toggling back and forth between the absolute and the relative, if that makes sense.

I'm finding, as I get older, that I'm not much of a believer in redemption. I mean, I believe in redemption in real life - redemption does happen, and it's cool when it does - but I find myself getting leery of my desire for it in stories (especially my own).

I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.

I think this is the other big issue that is not going away: Do we really believe that bit in the Constitution or not? I think we do.

I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.