“I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.”

If you want to be a writer, you don’t want to live in a comfortable place.

The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.

I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get–and never would get.

We have this huge discourse on family in this country, but no one deconstructs it the same way. People talk about “the American family.” The right wing has this thing – Focus on the Family. What the hell is that?

The heart can get really cold if all you’ve known is winter.

I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.

I bring my best instincts to my work. For instance – and I come by this naturally, or I think I do – I am a very good judge of character.

But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.

I didn’t think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.

I don’t want to just discuss the issues – I want family to be a real part of the character of the novels I write, and I don’t like to write things that feel like issue books.

You are thirst and thirst is all I know

I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.

Absent parents aren’t abusive per se. They’re neglectful. They love in a very imperfect way. There are parents like that, and they do love their daughters and sons, but they’re not parents in the way that we might think of it.

Mostly, I think people are fake. Well, what do you expect? The fake world we live in conspires to make us all fakes.

Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.

I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.

The Big Bang banged, and for some reason we’re here. And that’s astonishing. And that we can understand that, that’s the most astonishing.

The most important question regarding Big Data at almost any company is: How much are your customers really worth?

I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.

If you get a no from somebody, don’t say, ‘I’m going to take this as some big cosmic signal.’ No, you just got a no, deal with it. Just go to the next step.

The first big lead that I had on Broadway was in a show called La Strada.

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.

The Universe knows what it’s doing. So don’t develop a big ego, and don’t be afraid.