As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial a….

The level at which my OCD enters my writing process isn't that I slap the keyboard - it's more along the lines of a compulsive need to swap syllables….

I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced..

Life is fundamentally up for grabs.

Reading and writing are the same thing; it's just one's the more active and the other's the more passive. They flow into each other..

There's something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies..

All paths lead nowhere; choose one with heart....

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about..

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time..

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan..

Music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can't really make it. It's like a car I can't drive..

When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved..

What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?.

Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in….

Some people have things written all over their faces; the big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his..

I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, ….

Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey….

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time..

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts..

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me..

You can't be deep without a surface.