[The biggest disappointment is] that he [Barack Obama] deported everybody and their grandmother.

If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you're not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain't different or original.

I've been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That's what I do: I teach them writing.

Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.

The only way out is in.

For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.

What else she doesn't know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.