Be confident and the world responds to your confidence, rewards your faith. 
You can always spot the real thing, that affection; why does it always come from the wrong person? 
Always speak first to the toughest person in the room. 
He thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon. 
You can't just say that, Pasquale. Those words have tremendous power. It's how people end up married. 
The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25. 
Make them want to give you the thing you're taking. 
What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? 
Put the fire out? Hell no. What we need to do is stoke it. 
fierce tonight. Insistent. 
This is what happens when your life is authored not by God, but by David Mamet. 
Oh, the things she would say if she could--but it's a minefield of courtesies and manners, this dying business. 
No one gets to tell you what your life means! 
Before Pat could speak, the kid 
You take something from your past that you're somewhat ashamed about and you write about it from another character's point of view. 
(If I looked like you, Debra, I'd masturbate all the time 
Life, he thought, is a blatant act of imagination. 
Sometimes it was like a deep ache, the simple act of breathing in and out. 
Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love. 
My dad worked for 40 years in an aluminum plant. I don't think he ever got aluminum block. 
There was a real conflation of hero and victim in the wake of 9/11, in our perverse desire to create a triumphant myth out of pure tragedy. 
There was a time when self-promotion was considered so verboten, especially for authors. 
My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I've ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don't say I can write everything well. 
This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life. 
Ideas are sphincters. Every asshole has one. 
The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story. 
...life was a glorious catastrophe. 
All we have is the story we tell. 
as if ye have faith and it shall be given to you. 
The form is so malleable and can do so many things. 
If London was an alien city, Edinburgh was another planet 
The water. The feral cats scattered before her. 
All art is personal. Otherwise, what's the point? 
These are the ruins of our memories, which loom in our minds like the Parthenon, even as they are decayed and weathered by time and regret. 
Here for business or pleasure, Mr. Wheeler?""Redemption," Shane says.
(Agent: This book doesn't work. Shane: You mean, in your opinion. Agent: I mean in English). 
There are some people whose Twitter feeds are works of art. They intuitively understand how much of themselves to put out there. 
You had to write it, and he had to play it, and I'm just so grateful I got to see it. 
Stories are nations, empires. 
If a police officer arrests a mime, does he need to tell him he has the right to remain silent. 
And when our lives do begin? I mean, the exacting part, the action? It's all so fast. 
He was ready to stop trying to matter; he was ready to simply live. 
Being alive isn't the same thing as living 
Other women were like presents he was constantly disappointed in unwrapping 
He found himself in habiting the vast, empty plateau where most people live, between boredom and contentment. 
We want what we want - we love who we love. 
Divination of true nature. Of motivation. Of desirous hearts. I saw the whole world in a flash and I recognized it at once: We want what we want. 
The movie I was working on, "Cleopatra", it's about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that's what every story is about. 
Each gray hair still seemed like a weevil in a flower bed. 
I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories. 
Because I'm a novelist, I think in terms of structure. The way I keep going is through structure. It's what inspires me and pushes me through. 
I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years. 
What kind of wife would I be if I left your father simply because he was dead? 
God, this life is a cold, brittle thing. And yet it's all there is. 
I come from a newspaper background, so maybe I'm attuned to current events. 
It's one thing to know what people want. It's another to CREATE that want in them. To BUILD that desire. 
True sacrifice is painless. 
She saw death as just another wedding she wasn't invited to. 
On any given day in Spokane, Washington, there are more adult men per capita riding children's BMX bikes than in any other city in the world. 
There was nothing explicit between them, nothing more than that slightly open door. And yet . . . what could be more alluring? In 
My poems ... the ones that start out as jokes become these big ponderous things and the ones that start out ponderous devolve into jokes. 
With Facebook and Twitter, we're all our own little publicists in a way. 