If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.

I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together. If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn't be real.

"The Diagnosis" had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes. I would do something and let it sit for three months... just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn't quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.

My second novel, "Good Benito", was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.

I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.

Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.