“It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me – that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.”

It’s amazing what happens when you stick yourself in a place and let things take their more or less natural course.

Eruptions of talent continue to happen in Haiti, in spite of everything.

The Kessler Theater is one such gem, an Art Deco beauty … for a slice of real life, there’s always the Kessler.

I really had to decide why I was writing. I had no interest in going back to law; I very briefly – for about six hours – considered going to get my MBA, but in the end, I realized that the only work I really wanted to do was write.

I started publishing stories in small magazines early on, but after seven or eight or nine years you feel like you need a little more than that to show for your efforts.

I think if you spend much time dwelling on influence you can get self-conscious about every line you write. That’s a great way to freeze up.

I thought when I started writing that I’d have a book out in four or five years, and as it became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen, I became increasingly frustrated and unsure of myself.

I realized I was never going to have any peace with myself unless I made an honest stab at trying to write.

Maybe the light’s at the other end of the tunnel.

I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.

I have a horror of being self-indulgent and wasting time, and there is that risk in doing this kind of work. Are you totally deluded in sitting down at a desk every day and trying to write something? Is it self-indulgent, or might it possibly lead to something worthwhile?

I never listen to music when I’m writing.

By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.

The funny thing is, about the time I let go of any aspiration toward worldly success, that’s about the time I started writing decent work.

There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.

If a person wants to be of any use to himself, he better insist on getting his fair share of beauty and pleasure, and if there’s something about the system that’s keeping him from getting his share, then I think he’s well within his rights to fight to change that.

I look at the Senior Al Gore that I had the chance to serve in the Senate with. A great human being. He went down to defeat to this right wing bunch back at the time.

We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.

I think that she looks great. I think that as Jennifer Aniston gets older, she looks better and better, and I really like that.

The first thing people look at with Four Seasons records is the vocals. But for me, the drum fills and rhythms are as much a part of it as anything. They’re the base on which the harmonies were built.

When you’re doing stand-up, you achieve an intimacy with the audience you can’t get on TV. There’s not a better feeling in the entire world then when you look out and see the audience is identifying with you.

Sometimes you go up to people who look totally normal and then you talk to them for a few seconds and you are like, Oh I better get out of this, because this person is a little mentally unbalanced, and they are not going to get a joke.

Look, I debate for a living so I don’t need to learn any lessons from amateurs.

If I look at my old lyrics, they seem to be full of rage, but empty. There was an emptiness in my life.