Sometimes life seems so painful it hurts even to move my arms.

Nothing kinder than strangers. Nothing stranger than kindness.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating

Don't tell me I have latent sexism or racism that I need to confront. I don't believe that. I think we are so burned by the current situation that we want somebody that it isn't possible to have. We want someone who definitely looks like the messiah.

I live and die with the Chicago Cubs

I had a fantasy as a child that I might be a writer someday. I always thought that meant you went to New York or Paris. But after that intense summer, I never thought that I wanted to live any place but Chicago. It also made me see what the stakes were in the civil rights movement. And it made me see what real hatred was like and the forms that it took. But it also made me understand how powerless ordinary people feel in their lives.

People have less privacy and are crammed together in cities, but in the wide open spaces they secretly keep tabs on each other a lot more