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Every really good book on first reading is life changing.

Love is the difference between a full life and an empty one.

I’m obsessed with finding a convertible that has enough room.

Favorite character? What a question. It’s like choosing a favorite child.

Love is not something you wait for passively, but a practice.

Love’s not all that fun, but it saves you. And you should be saved.

I usually get my best writing done at night or at the close of day.

How does he do it? I’ve been trying to figure this out for the past decade.

The story of racism does not simply happen to people of color.

I’m a big fan of then. A novel needs a lot of thens.

I wish I could tell her that we aren’t supposed to know why we’re here.

I once heard in a sermon, “Choose the important over the urgent.”

One of my stories was rejected by a journal as “theatrical and self-limiting.”

In real life, my favorite character, so to speak, is Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Love enlarges. What you put out into the world, you get back tenfold.

Art doesn’t conform to a capitalist’s ratio of productivity to time.

There’s something to stepping right out of your dreams and onto the page.

I love talking to girls. That’s why I’ve written so much about them.

The Great Gatsby had an awful, detrimental effect on me.

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house.

I sometimes have to laugh because even now, as a middle-aged man.

I found it impossible not to imagine a radiant future for myself.

Poets need to be
in constant touch with the extremes of feeling.

Jayne Anne Phillips

When he died earlier this year an enormous hole was left in my life.

Eating a raw oyster is like exchanging a soul kiss with the sea.

For years I thought this light was love, or God, but now I know it’s fear.