“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.”

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

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’m ashamed and embarrassed to say that I’ve read very little of David Foster Wallace’s work. It’s a huge gap in my education, one of many.

If you could figure out how to live with family then you’d gone a long way toward finding your peace.

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

Television is 15 hour days. Movies are 18 hour days. And it’s 18 hours of doing not a thing.

I sleep nine hours every night, I have a little nap after lunch, and, if I’m going out for dinner, I sneak in an extra one before I head out.

TV is a hard job. You work 15 hours a day. People tell you what to do. I hate to do it.

If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama.

You do get really exhausted doing films. You work such long hours, and after a while, things can get out of perspective, just like if anyone’s tired, things get on top of them.

As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No … eight days a week.

The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart.

Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it.