We know that people we love are both good and bad, but we expect strangers to be one or the other.

One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, 'I hope that you will love me for no good reason.' But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another, to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers, especially to strangers who have neither good, nor bad reasons to love us.

Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.

But on the other hand, I don't actively seek out stories or hunt them down.

It's hard to know more about a person's life than what that person wants you to know.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

It was strange to stand there in front of the mirror and see myself like I was my own best friend, a kid wanted to hang with forever. This was a boy I could travel to the seacoasts with, a boy I'd like to meet up with in foreign cities like Calcutta and London and Brazil, a boy I could trust who also had a good sense of humor and liked smoked oysters from a can and good weed and the occasional 40 ounces of malt. If I was going to be alone for the rest of my life this was the person I wanted to be alone with.