If you haven't taken a writing class, take a writing class. I took every class that was available in my area. I went to conferences inside and outside my area to network with people. That's how I got my agent. I found my agent through another agent w...
I think grief and fear are going to come to him suddenly. They'll be undiluted and words won't work. We're all going to get hit and won't know how to hit back. I wish I knew the answers, how to help myself and the people who will hurt all around me.
More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell th...
When I'm talking about depression, I'm talking about the more severe forms of depression, and I think that conceptualising as a form of grief is probably not the most effective way of looking at it. I mean, at the end of the day, people suffer enormo...
I don't think people know me at all. At the end of the day, if you see me in sequins and glitter out at a club, you might think that's all there is. But, you know, it's just glitter. My friends who I've known since I was 17 - they know who I am.
When I was doing 'Generation Kill' in Africa I worked with five really super-trained Navy SEALs who taught us all these moves like how to disarm people: if there's a bar fight and someone's got a chair or there's someone with a gun behind our head, h...
Facts count. Conspiracy theories, usually the refuge of the bitter or disempowered, range from factually challenged to wildly hallucinogenic. Many conspiracy theories do both overt and tacit harm. Almost all are insults, intended or unintended, are i...
As I've traveled around the country, it has surprised me how many times I've heard people in small businesses use that word 'saved.' I believe many small businesses would not have had access to credit and would not have survived without the $50 billi...
What I find very attractive, what I find sexual, are people who are unapologetic for who they are and comfortable with themselves. And I think with those two things sexual energy does come out because you're not hovering or censoring yourself, you're...
I am fortunate in having this bone structure because I have a tremendously prominent temple. I like to think that's it's because I'm so intelligent. People say: 'You haven't got a line on your forehead.' I do. It's just the bones are holding them all...
Everyone is living for everyone else now. They're doing stuff so they can tell other people about it. I don't get all that social media stuff, I've always got other things I want to do - odd jobs around the house. No one wants to hear about that.
Noises and smells, those can bring back powerful memories. I remember when I was going to school one Fourth of July, and there were a lot of fireworks going off. I knew that I was in Richmond. I knew that I was a college student. But I thought people...
The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own ...
If you're about to take a risk--one that comes from within, one that expresses your true nature, that brings up fear after fear after fear--you know what to do. One: do the work, create the value. Two: draw the people that encourage you closer. They'...
Sometimes words just arent enough. Sometimes it's easier to magically lose yourself in the memories long past, the ones you so selfishly took for granted. And sadly sometimes that's the only way to keep those people in your life- recapturing their gl...
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have e...
If you got a dope girl, there's going to be people that want her. But I don't know, I've always kept my 'A-game' on point. I just make a point to make sure the woman that I'm with is taken care of. You got to keep it new, so I go out of my way to mak...
All I've really ever done is write since I was 17, so I don't know anything about anything. For me to do a novel, I have to talk to people who know things. And what keeps me in suspense is that I am a crime aficionado.
The problem with being a journalist is you go places and you're working. You don't get to appreciate everything. But I got enough of a sampler of South Africa; I thought, 'I want to come here when I don't have to interview people for a living so that...
With Catty and Patrick's images in he side mirror waving from the steps of that house like Jethro and Ellie Mae, it occurred to me that something extraordinary had happened. I had effortlessly found a place of acceptance -- a place where people had t...
I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people wou...
