Anything that's worth anything is complicated.

The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.

Many things embarrass me, but reading isnt one of them. Im not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.

Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.

A common defense among obituary-fanciers such as myself is that the obit is not about death at all. It is about life. This is true since an article about the condition of deadness would make for turgid reading at best.

Art doesn't spring from the muses alone, but from hard work.

You know, there's that silly saying 'We're born alone and we die alone' -it's nonsense. We're surrounded at birth and surrounded at death. It is in between that we're alone.