Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

Perhaps if we say it straight, we suspect, if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we'll find we're nothing but banal.

Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

I've been thinking so much about writing as a gift to readers - and how newness of subject (place or topic or person) is one of the biggest gifts at our disposal.

I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.

In my own life as a reader I experience real moments of alienation when a writer feels too perfect, or like even the flaws they are admitting are somehow noble, or dysfunctional in an overly edgy, aesthetically pleasing way.