“So I suppose the answer is I see myself in all my characters, in their best moments and in their worst.”

That is much of what I think the writer’s job is – to slow people down.

Finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

You try not to because it’s hard and at times shameful, but then when you read those pages over and you see they have no life to them so you throw them away and force yourself to be more honest.

Discovery is the joy.

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we’ve chosen to govern ourselves.

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about.

As I see it, my job as a writer isn’t to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings.

To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive.

Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

The only thing I really worry about is my live stand-up show because I have to answer to the fans.

I talk to myself all the time. Just make sure you answer.

When you’re faced with an opponent, the media asks the questions, and I answer truthfully. I don’t hold back.

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it’s probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

It comes to the one who rests upon the promises of the Word. It comes to the man who lives by faith as if in the actual possession of the answer to his prayer, although the enemy is still around him.

Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.

One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.