"I'm much more afraid of not writing something that I should be writing than failing at something that I write. "
"A good book actually can change the world. I just believe that. It makes people see things differently..”
"If a book I write gets taken off the shelf, it's not the end of the world, but if I don't write the thing that I feel I should be writing, then it is kind of the end of the world, at least for me. At least I will decide I should stop doing what I'm doing and do something else."
"That's what's good about books - their meaning doesn't belong to anybody."
"I don't have real intentions when I start to write. The accident can be fortuitous if you let them be. I don't trust my intuitions, I don't trust my abilities, but I do trust accidents, to be somebody who recognizes them."
“Somebody asked me how you would define yourself? and what I said is my book is how I define myself. It precisely how would I define myself even though I’m not like the character, even what in the book does not happen to me. The thing that I like about writing is that is it give me a good opportunity to define myself that I don’t have in my none-writing life. And I haven’t found the other way to do it. So until I found the better way to do it, it will become more important to me to define myself.”
Author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
