One of my big revelations was that nobody cares whether you write your novel or not. They want you to be happy. Your parents want you to have health insurance. Your friends want you to be a good friend. But everyone’s thinking about their own problems and nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, ‘Boy, I sure hope Sam finishes that chapter and gets one step closer to his dream of being a working writer.’ Nobody does that. If you want to write, it has to come from you. If you don’t want to write, that’s great. Go do something else. That was a very liberating moment for me.

I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.

This country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them.

Everything's weird if you stare at it.

I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

Write what you know. Write what you don't know. But most of all, write what you'd rather not know.

Yes, we could solve for why, but we could also eat another slice of coconut cake.