All language is an aspiration to music.

I want to view my own efforts to write a novel as a function of my own artistic aspirations rather than a good career move. And I need to learn how to commit to characters for a longer time, to confront the limits of my own capacities for attention and compassion. That's what a writing career does, in the best instance: it allows you to keep after what you can't do.

All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.

Most forms of rage, after all, are only sloppy cloaks for grief.

A good teacher, after all, wields the authority of a parent with none of the psychological baggage. The best of them are semi-mysterious figures whose wisdom seems boundless and whose approval helps us discover who we are.

People in long-term, monogamous relationships are crushed by the expectation that a partner is going to provide everything they are looking for and wondering why they are dissatisfied when they have four of the ten boxes checked.

I really believe that art has to play a role in changing the moral direction. Mean, selfish people are in charge of the government and we're letting them make us into a much meaner culture. It reminds me of McCarthyism, to be honest, and to the early stages of fascism. There are people out there cheering for war, treating those deaths like some kind of athletic event. How sick do we have to be that this is not only acceptable, but virtually unchallenged by other politicians or clergy or anyone? And it's artists who have to stand up and be counted. Right now.