“You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.”

Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

Everything truly important is washable.

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.

I don’t bring expectations to any of my books. I don’t tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

I’m widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I’m not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.

There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.

Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it’s going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.

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.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.

Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they’re afraid to plant themselves?

There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.

I wasn’t a comic book geek as a kid. I read some, but it was just like, ‘Oh, I have this comic book here.’ It wasn’t like I was collecting them.

I’m serious when I do my work. I’m not serious when I’m home with my kids.

Kids don’t care about rock and roll as much as they used to, as the other generations have.

With my kids, they’re told 75 times a day that they’re loved.

Kids are an important audience to reach for the future of the planet.

I don’t know, I’ve liked football since I was a kid and I’ve always dreamt of becoming a professional footballer, I never thought of any other job.

Sharing a moment with kids can often transport you back to your childhood.

As a father you need to do everything, be it playing games with your kids, gyming with them, or for that matter cutting their hair.