I think everyone wants to be entertained, and everyone also wants to know why life is worth living.

There was something holy to me about the raised proscenium and the rows of chairs and the lights above.

Writing is a way of stepping back from our thoughts and beliefs and experiences so that we can see them accurately.

Don’t write from fear; it’s a shallow source of motivation.

My main job when teaching is to remind my students that they are perfectly equipped to tell any story the want to tell.

That guy taking care of stuff, the domestic Bill, the busy Bill – I don’t think of him as the real me anymore.

All the blank page wants to know is what you’re most interested in right now.

There is something more powerful than a good review or a clever Instagram post or even the recommendation of a friend at play when stories and lovers are found.

To see a memory or a moment without judgment, to just behold it, is to glimpse the totality and integrity of the world

Every detail in the story is there only to serve it, and the story serves the author, who also serves it in the telling.

What we call inequality is a lack of kindness, which everyone has experienced in solitude at some point.

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s what I love.

By all means, fill your stories with conflict. But do so with a purpose.

The only thing I can be really certain about is what I like right now, and even that requires some focus.

Writing, at its best, is the practice of looking for what we want exactly where it is.

What more could I want other than to be interested and surprised and satisfied, to express in the world – if only on a page – what I knew first in the private theater of my imagination.

There’s something about my life away from the desk, with mortgages and groceries and medical bills, that seems forever tied to the uncreative business of mere survival.

The actors in Chariots of Fire really did know how to run, but that’s not why I liked that movie.