This whole literary game of trying to put yourself in the shoes of your opponent is good for everybody. It leaves you more open-hearted, it gives you a more accurate vision of the other person, because it's more based on curiosity than projection. In the end if you do have to fight, you're better equipped to fight. Also it doesn't leave you damaged at the end, it doesn't leave you hateful or malformed by your own anger.

Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.

We're in the transition between birth and death. But the one that people often know about is the transition between the moment of death and whatever comes next, so reincarnation or heaven or hell.

...smile first, then speak.

I'm a big lover of America. I love the people, but also the weird berms, the strange little high schools tucked away in different places, and just the whole geography and the psycho­logical apparatus of Americans.

I feel that there is nothing that can happen to a person that is banal. Everything that happens to us is interesting.

Whole idea is really intriguing to me. If you took snapshots of ourselves throughout the day, the way that our mind is twisting and turning, then at the moment of death, the mind would be twisting and turning in the same way. But the Buddhists say it's super-sized because there's no bodily damper on it.