“Writing is hard work, and if anything’s true about the process, it’s that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper.”

To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they’re always with you because they’re a part of you.”

All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.

What’s less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I’ve changed the cat little because I didn’t know what my characters were going to say next.

Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.

And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.

Still, I’d thought I’d had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

Where we are from… [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro.

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn’t speak for themselves.

Sometimes in life, things happen that will knock you back. Hell, you may get beaten to your knees but you must never ALLOW this world to knock you down!

The death of dictator Kim Jong-Il has cast all eyes on North Korea, a country without literature or freedom or truth.

But, in North Korea, it’s just the opposite. There’s one story. It’s written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous.

Anything you can do needs to be done, so pick up the tool of your choice and get started.

The more I resist anything, the stronger it gets.

A gun fires of its own accord and a man is shot. And a broken-down old house no good for anything but chasing kids has to trip over us. Blind accidents. What can you do against blind accidents?

I’m never absolutely sure of anything, and I don’t want to be. You’re either right and you’ll pull through, or you’re not. We’re never going to be right about everything, and we’ve certainly been wrong.

How can you think that that will evoke the past? It doesn’t even have to evoke anything, but anyway, it’s how we’re living. It’s this moment where nobody has to immediately think too much about how things are being documented. It’s a great time.

Anything that I do, I try to make it as good as I possibly can.

It’s not easy for a mother and son to sing a duet. You can’t just sing about anything.

I thought anything might happen if I wasn’t vigilant. I didn’t eat. I didn’t go out. I didn’t want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul.