Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify..

Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, th….

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it..

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction..

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials..

I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave..

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature..

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become….

America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that….

Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expec….

Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strange….

I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures..

I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brim….

People really get myopic as they get older. We're not a culture that encourages dreaming or distraction. We're not ever good at just being. I remembe….

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories..

Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest..

Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn't have to worry about some squeaky-shoe….

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive..

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them..

A single note, held in an amber suspension of time, like a charcoal drawing of Icarus falling. It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely….

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams..