“Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?”

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business…I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It’s just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.

Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.

Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.

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.

Our relationships, relationships between adults, how all those pieces fit together – that’s the most complicated thing we all face.

I always listen, I ask children, I even ask adults in tennis, “What are your children playing?” And most of the time it’s not tennis. It’s pathetic.

When you’re a boy your life can be measured out as a series of uncomfortable conversations reluctantly initiated by adults in an effort to tell you things that you either already know or really don’t want to know.

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was this what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn’t like it, but it made it easier to go on.

Small children do not belong at an adult party, and especially should not be used like trained midgets to help serve martinis.

Can we not interpret our adult wisdom into the language of boyhood?

Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities?