Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.

He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.

Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams.

People are icebergs. So much of us is underneath.

You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you can change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.

One thing I've learned: you can know anything, it's all there, you just have to find it.