Researchers tell us that we have about sixty thousand thoughts a day.
That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.
The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.
I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough. ’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.
I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.
I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.
The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.
There's this kind of strange mythology about me in the media because I've done unusual things.
I loved my boarding school, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't have a career.
Every moment I shape my destiny with a chisel - I am the carpenter of my own soul.
Men little know when they say hard things to us how well we remember them, and how much harm they do us.