The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

I think being an editor really helped me take other people's notes on my writing. I'd get a note like 'It's too wet' or 'The first couple chapters are good, but then the rest of the pages were so wet that they were completely illegible' or 'Did you dip this in Sprite? This smells like Sprite. Why would you dip your novel in Sprite?' And instead of pushing back, I'd listen. That's an incredibly important skill for a young writer to have.

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?