Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?

He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.

The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.

You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

I know a lot of people who read and think: "George [Saunders] is so much fun." There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.