I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we’re living in a story.

It is difficult to predict what our finest moments will be, but we know when they happen.

And didn’t we pledge, pledge, pledge, palms on our chests, every day we lived, pledge to the one nation, the freedom we believed in, didn’t we? Fat lot of good.

I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music – Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering ‘The Lost Chord’ on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn.

So ask yourself, you swirling tornado of a human being, in a world of disoriented honeybees, do you want to look locked out the minute you sit down?

Mystery: Everything felt better before you got there than when you actually got there. When you actually got there, you didn’t quite have the energy to be there.

My mother used to tell me when I went somewhere, “Please leave your foolishness at home.” But how could I do that? It was stuck on me.

Procrastination is the most creative act there is.

I’m the sea, I’m not afraid of the storm. The sea’s dream is always turbulence. If I don’t have waves and storms, I won’t be the sea anymore. I’ll be the pond – and stinking.

All our roots go deep down, even if they’re tangled.