connection Quotes

We don't see a lot of models for male social interaction. There's sports and barn raisings.

It takes a lot to get people talking in airplanes. But once they start talking, you just can't shut them up.

I tell everyone I interact with what I'm working on and let them bring me anecdotes that illustrate my themes.

My books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation - often elevated loneliness - to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not alone; they are with people.

My way of being with people is probably incredibly unhealthy, in that I'll be incredibly social, and I won't write a word for maybe a year, and I'll just be with people, going to parties and soaking up stories, and just sort of recharging all of my ideas.

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

People have to deal with their issues together; they have to expose themselves and kind of exhaust themselves.

I have a lot of fans who are in the prison system, where ramen noodles are a kind of staple. Prisoners are always sending me recipes.

I don't do much more than organise other people's ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.