I watched a documentary about the immigrant crisis around the world. And it does make me blush at all the times I've stood up on the stage and given your speech about the healing power of fiction.

Success makes opportunities and so many of those "opportunities" are actually exemptions - from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.

On one level, I am a total softie, sort of depressed and afraid of losing the people I love or failing them. To disguise that, there's all this harsh, poop-centric, external swagger, full of nastiness. I'm a cloaking device.

Toni Morrison seems to have a lot of faith in people - that's what I mean by gentle power.

It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.