“But I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.”

I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: “Do you like me?

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?

My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice.

With writing, we have second chances.

Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean].

Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me

Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.

Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do, I am not a hero, it is true, But I am not a bad person, either.

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don’t mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.

It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

My point is there’s a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It’s a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

Survival is ugly. Healing is messy. Self-love is complicated. It is your hardest days as much as your best days that help you grow. All of this is part of being human.

Survival is ugly. Healing is messy. Self-love is complicated.

Directing is monumentally complicated and it’s a function of all the time you pay to it. I think it would be great to do a movie I’m not in, I could just eat Fritos and just say, ‘yeah, it’s good!’ Some day.

Women are a beautiful complication, and I look forward to far more beauties and far more complications.

Modern civilisation is complicated and artificial. Simple folk live in a world of love and peace. Let no one hate another or harm another.

And it will fall out as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore, you will provoke another; and that which removes the one ill symptom produces others.

Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer