Thank you for this, Peter. For dry eyes and silent weeping. You taught me how to hide anything i felt. More than ever, i need that now.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

There is no society that does not highly value fictional storytelling. Ever.

The problem with elections is that anybody who wants an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn’t have it. And anybody who does not want an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn’t have it, either. Government office should be received like a child’s Christmas present, with surprise and delight. Instead it is usually received like a diploma, an anticlimax that never seems worth the struggle to earn it.

The opposite of the happy ending is not actually the sad ending-the sad ending is sometimes the happy ending. The opposite of the happy ending is actually the unsatisfying ending.

It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really about.

there were crimes and quarrels, alongside kindness and cooperation; there were people who loved each other and people who did not; it was a human world.