“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”

“Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to...”

“Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.”

“I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.”

“The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.”

“Death is just life's next big adventure.”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”

“You see, in this country are a number of youths who do not like to work, and the college is an excellent place for them.”

“Sometimes the gap between what you are and what you want to be is a little piece of paper called your college degree. So jump.”

“I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.”

“I don't view Twitter as a promotional tool but as a really, really, really cool cocktail party.”

“I've come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.”

“From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.”