If you're a "good" teacher, somebody who is responsible or careful, teaching takes time. Teaching is performative. Students nowadays evaluate you and there's a lot made in these evaluations about how you perform. Maybe you don't have the greatest delivery in the world. But you know a lot, have a lot to offer. So that's pretty unsettling. We've become so image-based and performance-based as a society. You have to be ready to appear on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" at any moment.

Wanting to know all kinds of things is perfect for novelists, because novelists are generalists. We're not specialists in anything, except, hopefully, writing.

[Reality] isn't simply the so-called world that you're in. Your reality is a much larger one that takes in all matter of identification and desires and hopes.

I don't believe a picture is worth a thousand words, unless they're very confusing words.

I learned I could be miserable anywhere in the world. I learned I really was an American.

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.

Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.