...smile first, then speak.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things - travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes...but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.

If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.

I am always considering the reader. Although this is admittedly kind of odd: Which reader? On what day? In what mood? For me, that "reader" is actually just me, if I had never read the story before.

Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.

Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.

Just through the process of trying to make the living and the dead feel real, all these little benefits came out. And these benefits turned out to be much more articulate statements of what I really believe. And somehow they were more convincing because they were arrived at at such length.