We imagine people as animals or gods. -But she was just a person, a girl.

Beware of that monster called 'self-loathing'.

We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors . . . But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.

I don't think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing.

One of the jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our everyday lives.

It was kind of a beautiful day, finally real summer in Indianapolis, warm and humid - the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world.

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.