Until you can become accountable to yourself and only yourself, you're probably not going to live a fully vital life. So much of literature is about accountability. The moral issues in most novels are about people becoming responsible for their own behaviour. One of the forces against being responsible for your own behaviour is the force of the past, in the way that the past tries to form you.

Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.

I don't want to be taken to Bhutan and smell the flowers. I want to be told something I couldn't have been told any other way.

Things you did. Things you never did. Things you dreamed. After a long time they run together.

Find what causes a commotion in your heart. Find a way to write about that