Write your goddamned book now. The world awaits.
You might not be able to operate your own Learjet and have an unlimited expense account, but if you have a reasonable expectation for a print-based product, whether it’s a newspaper or a magazine, you can certainly exist.
Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.
The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can’t cut corners.
It all meant something. Until it didn’t.
Maybe he was more than the sum of his broken parts.
They were so in love with the world, and so disappointed in every aspect of it.
Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I’ll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.
But Saudi Arabia is surprising in a lot of ways. Like any place, or any people, it relentlessly defies easy categorization.
But I’m thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine.
And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.
I think I’m far too hopeful and trusting. That’s something I got from my mum.
Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.
Why shouldn’t your curiosity about the world be rewarded?
The weird thing is that working within an established story was actually kind of liberating. You know the beginning and middle and end, more or less, so there’s less pressure to figure all that out.
Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn’t so good at that.
When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.
When I was on the bestseller list with the first book, everyone who knows me knows that every week it continued to be on the list was a very dark week for me. Everyone knows that all I wanted was to be off that list.
You treat a kid with respect and as an adult you talk to them as if they’re smart people. But you don’t throw at them the trappings of adulthood and you know, the darker stuff.
When we pass by another person without telling them we love them it’s cruel and wrong and we all know this.