We are formed by what we desire

My old coach used to say that if you were in it for the match, if you were in it for the trophies, you were in it for the wrong reasons.

I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.

…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.

I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.

I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst and I'm not an intellectual.