Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close ...

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

I was a nerdy kid.

I'm terrified of cliches.

A real diamond is never perfect.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

Anyone can grow into something beautiful.

Don’t you want to be alive before you die?

My goals aren't really commercial success.

Every second I have spare, I'm with my kids.

Your behavior is a choice; it isn’t who you are.

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

I always told my dad I'd play professional football.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

I read Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat' when I was 11.

I traveled a full two years with 'Language of Flowers.'

First drafts are never any good - at least, mine aren't.

My ribs ache from all the texts I'll never make time for.

I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.

Great writers probably shouldn't be ranked, at least not by me.

The Apocalypse would definitely put a crimp in my career plans.

I never really considered writing something that was nonfiction.

Fiction writing is just an excuse to go discover interesting things.

Short stories are not maybe the biggest deal in our culture anymore.

I would rather eat broken glass and drink iodine than do the dishes.

Indeed, every book on my shelves is a key to a little vault of memories.

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.

God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

Sometimes my readers ask me what else they should read, and I recommend Sebald.

I love Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson. 'The Passion' is my favourite book.

The problem is foster youth don't really have this network that other kids have.

That's the power of fiction, that it can take the collective and make it personal.

Hate can be passionate or disengaged; it can come from dislike but also from fear.

We Americans are churning through fresh water at an alarming and unsustainable rate.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

I would take today's joy, and tomorrow's. I would take it with both hands, anywhere it came.

You need to be imagining all the time, imagining yourself outside the walls of your own skull.

I think fiction is important because it has the power to transport a reader into another life.

The most amazing gift about being a novelist is that you get to pursue your curiosity every day.

I don't think there is anything magical about the language of flowers in real life or in my book.

The most violent and troubling stories become part of our national consciousness about foster care.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

The world is so fundamentally interesting that it makes me fall in love with it a dozen times a day.

Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.

There are gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel's, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.

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