Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.

Little children are all writers.

We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.

Telling someone to be confident in the abstract is not going to make it easier for the unconfident writer to actually get herself or himself to the point of being able to put in the upsetting stuff.

I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.

I began to see, again and again, stories that were first confusing and second where the emotional impact was muted because the big scene came before the explanation of what was going on. There was a reverse chronological order as well as a concealment of what exactly was going on. I think often that comes out of the fear of being boring, and sometimes I think it's just an attempt to seem clever.

I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.