Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

You can say you're a liberal and everybody laughs and it's a good time.

When I think about what fiction does morally, I'm happier thinking of a person full of multiplicities - sort of fragmented.

My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.

The thing I've discovered that is a help is that there isn't a simple virtue or a simple vice. They're always connected. If you have Tendency A, that you loathe, you can almost be sure that Tendency B, which you love, is somehow connected to it.

Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.