My grandmother told me that her father used to ask her a riddle: What must you break apart in order to bring a family close together? Bread, of course.

There are certain things that I'll hear about and that I think will make a great book and I put it in a file. Sometimes it's a situation that interests me, and I don't even realize what I'm trying to say about it until I get closer to it. Sometimes the book after that I've written 125 pages of, and I can tell you what the book is after that. I just sort of have a linear progression, but more than anything, the topics land in your lap. I don't feel that I go out searching for them.

It felt like I'd been living underground, and for a moment, I'd been given this glimpse of the sky. Once you've seen that, how can you go back where you came from?

But there's an enormous difference between an audience that's watching you because they can't wait to see what comes next and an audience that's watching you because they're waiting for you to fail.

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

Sometimes the key to happiness is just expecting a little bit less

If you focus on sandbagging the beachhead, you can ignore the tsunami that's approaching. Try it any other way and you'll go crazy.