Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one's will to live.

The problem with growing up is that once you're grown up, the people who aren't grown up aren't fun anymore.

That’s what death did, it treated you like a child, like everything you had ever thought and done and cared about was just a child’s game, to be crumpled up and thrown away when it was over. It didn’t matter. Death didn’t respect you. Death thought you were bullshit, and it wanted to make sure you knew it.

We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.

The process of learning is a nonstop orgy of wonderment.

It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.

I came from an anxious, overly intense East Coast academic family. That was the way of our tribe.