In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.

In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range

But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.