“Life versus Death, the absolute randomness of one’s position, privilege, and place, the lot one draws, and so on. It has made previously suspicious-seeming clichés seem more tolerable.”

I think something many of us grapple with are those times we dread the practice of writing, no matter the project.

Love may not be all you need, but it is certainly a necessity. My desire to survive has been exponentially magnified by the fact that there is someone intimately tangled up in me who would be left alone with the world.

Me and my wife were interested in avoiding style, in eliminating voice, in getting away from the poetry logics, textures, and propulsions that we normally employ in our writing. But we arrived at even this organically and separately.

The illness has only made certain ambivalences I’d always been conscious of that much more acute.

Suddenly we had become these people who didn’t drink anything but kale, who ended many of our conversations with tears, and for whom no future was guaranteed. It was kind of funny.

Me and my wife had somehow finally reached a moment in which our lives made sense, in which we were comfortable in certain material ways, and in that very moment we were faced with a medical situation that could only really be resolved with death or time.

In every position that I’ve been in, there have been naysayers who don’t believe I’m qualified or who don’t believe I can do the work. And I feel a special responsibility to prove them wrong.

I believe the single most significant decision I can make on a day-to-day basis is my choice of attitude. It is more important than my past, my education, my bankroll, my successes or failures, fame or pain, what other people think of me or say about me, my circumstances, or my position.

Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.

I was not in the race to become a chief minister. I had never thought about it.

Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.

Any man who puts you in a position to lose you, will never be worthy of your energy, leave him.

Character – not wealth, power, or position – is the supreme word.

I put the good playing and game first, and money, prizes are secondary.