We know that everything in our lives is complex and gray.
Guys who always shined their shoes were usually self-involved asswipes who figure superficiality trumps substance.
Being this handsome. It is not easy, you realize.’ ‘And yet you suffer without complaint.
They’re politicians,’ Win said. ‘They’d lie and evade if you asked them what they had for breakfast.
Life, he suspected, hinges too often on chance. We all want to convince ourselves that it is about hard work and education and perseverance, but the truth is, life is much more about the fickle and the random. We don’t want to admit it, but we are controlled by luck, by timing, by fate.
This was life though, wasn’t it? Death made you crave life. The world is nothing but a bunch of thin lines separating what we think are extremes.
The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies.
Only bad writers think they’re good.
I always think the insecurity is going to go away, but it’s always there. Only bad writers think they’re good.
Writing a novel in general is like trying to reach a mountain top you’ll never quite reach – so you try again and maybe get a little closer.
Hope can be the most wonderful thing in the world or it can crush your heart like an eggshell.
There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.
Trust is like that. You can break it for a good reason. But it still remains broken.
This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments – and you get the tears at the end, too.
Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of course. We all have our own dreams and hopes and wants and lust and heartaches. We all have our own brand of crazy.
I would rather raise certain topics and maybe let you ruminate on them. I’m not big on answering them.
I pretty much only wear Lilly Pulitzer ties because my best friend owns the company.
The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman’s ‘Marathon Man.’ That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.
A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don’t want to see how it was made.
I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It’s very thin, it’s made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.