You aren’t the same person after a good night’s sleep as you are after a sleepless night. But which person is you?

Respect the one-hit wonder not for his one hit but for all the days he must have suffered afterward, trying for another.

Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages.

Everything has to be paid for, especially money.

Every success story can be told as a series of failures.

I like writing that is unsummarizable, a kernel that cannot be condensed, that must be uttered exactly as it is.

There are two kinds of people: those who can’t perform the act when they’re sad and those who perform it only to escape sadness. I have a theory that the second kind of person lives longer.

I annotated my friend’s book manuscript with scribbles on every page. She annotated mine with a single note: This needs to be better. She trusted that I would know what to do, and I did.

Is it a failure of my imagination that I’ve never been able to summon any genuine feeling about a sports team?