"If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience."
"Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards."
Soren Kierkegaard on Experience"The only source of knowledge is experience."
Albert Einstein on Experience"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."
C. S. Lewis on Experience"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."
Oscar Wilde on Experience"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."
Mark Twain on Experience"We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish."
"My habit would have been to veer towards the dark - to prove I was something edgy, or maybe to prove that I was cognisant of the dark side. Now, with age and confidence, I can say, yeah, that's true, but I am cognisant of the fact that people can do things well. And can be more loving than you expect."
"I still believe that capitalism is too harsh and I believe that, even within that, there is a lot of satisfaction and beauty if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, although that doesn't eradicate the reality of the suffering. It's all true at once, kind of humming and sublime."
"I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar."
"I'm finding, as I get older, that I'm not much of a believer in redemption. I mean, I believe in redemption in real life - redemption does happen, and it's cool when it does - but I find myself getting leery of my desire for it in stories (especially my own)."