I do write fiction, and I find it more difficult, but also more liberating. On the one hand, you can make up the story, but you have to make up the story.

I do believe that great love brings with it the terror and possibility of great loss.

Although I don’t think love is quantitatively measured – in other words, I don’t believe that you “don’t know love until you have a child,” that whole thing – I do believe it is qualitatively different.

I think it’s more important to concentrate on trying to be, simply, happy. Once you’ve known deep despair, you feel even more motivated to be as happy as possible. That’s how I feel.

People romanticize, I think, this notion of life. But life at all costs is not life, it’s ego-extension.

I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in that chaotic reality, and also this: that none of us knows anything about anything. Period.

Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms of word choice, plot, etc.

I have been, earlier in my life, a lazy writer. I’d spend three hours at the gym to avoid writing, or I’d just find other distractions – reading, doing laundry, talking on the phone, etc. But suddenly I was like a laser beam: I was relentlessly focused, sometimes to the detriment of other things.

Think of how much we stress about living up to our “potential,” and how it creates anxiety and terror in people; in short, stops them from living their life as fully as they might out of fear and self-loathing.

I love poetry, but I find it so difficult to write well.

I honestly turned to writing because I didn’t know what else to do, and because a friend had gently suggested it.

The most precious love is often the kind that isn’t returned, and that is given freely.