“Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.”

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Don’t wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.

It’s what you do that makes your soul.

The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.

It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.

She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.

I prefer to remain anomalous.

To think is not always to see.

There are some who’d hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think’s been too lucky.

A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.

Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.

Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need

Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

There is something that might be called cinematic beauty. It can only be expressed in a film, and it must be present for that film to be a moving work.

Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied… That’s why they can keep on working.

The logs of wood which move down the river together Are driven apart by every wave.

Americans make money by playing `money games,’ namely mergers, acquisitions, by simply moving money back and forth … instead of creating and producing goods with some actual value.

If we don’t keep people engaged, we’re not going to move you. And if we move you, we’ve done something useful. That’s what anybody who writes genre knows.

Money is part of how we move through the world, what stores and restaurants we go into, whether we take a train to the airport or a taxi. Describing characters living in the real world requires describing them engaging with money.

The loneliness is when you pick up and move, even if you are not originally from that place, and you have some memories that you want to embrace.

When you understand the purpose [of life], then you can deal and journey through the obstacles, the rejections, the stops and starts, highs-and-lows with a different lens because you know that you’re moving in what you’re supposed to do.