I'm fascinated with actors, and I've never quite understood the process.

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.

Even the written history [of Abraham Lincoln's times] is poorly understood by most people.

I'm a big fan of the Russians: Isaac Babel is just an exquisite line-to-line stylist.

Some of Buddhist texts say that, in the moment after you die, you think of New Jersey and you go to New Jersey or you think of 1820 and you go to 1820. Also, all your sort of inner-symbology gets writ large. So, if you're a Christian, you see Christian iconography.

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

Writing a story I am just trying to find some little interesting thing to start out with: something small, even trivial. Preferably something that doesn't have a lot of thematic or political baggage - a little crumb that is interesting.