Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.

Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.

I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You'd swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful.

Indeed, I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don't know how to deal with them in real life.

For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.