“So maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I’m interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.”

When I started I would have called myself an artist but the discipline I chose in art was music and text.

I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.

Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

I worked probably fewer jobs than most people, or fewer real soul-killing jobs than other people. I’ve been a typist, a typesetter, a keyliner, cappuccino-maker. I think I’ve been pretty lucky.

It is interesting to be here and to see that for certain actors they have to live in a way that you think of nobody living anymore except for in small towns. They have such elaborate double lives.

For ‘King Cole’s American Salvage,’ I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars.

I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it’s something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.

I think it gets uncomfortable when you try to act like you didn’t just tell a joke that bombed.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

In a regular class I don’t focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

That was a mistake, I guess, going out to California. They have these things called guidance counselors in high school. They drink a lot of herbal tea.

We know that we need to explore desire in fiction – many say that the only way a story exists is that a character feels a strong desire – and nature is the place where creatures act on their desires in the most pure way imaginable.

I’m not much interested in my own self when I write. I’m interested in what I observe out there, what’s going on around me.

I’m not aiming for a knockout. I focus on doing my best. If the knockout comes, fine. If not, that’s okay.

You can’t be without passion. Passion means the possessiveness to be the best.

The best roles you have to fight for. You have to really want to do it and you have to go after it.

Maybe the lesson is not how best to chase the things we think will make us happy, but learning to be happy wherever we are instead.

I’m just kind of taking what I get and making the best out of it, honestly.

I want to be the best fighter. I would like to fight in the biggest fights.

I was just doing my job in the ring and doing my best to make people happy.

I was given a talent to play cricket. I don’t know why I was given it. But I was. I owe it to all those who wish it had been them to give of my best, every day.