I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

I was always a sensitive, sweet kid, but I got brutalized and I became brutal. And frankly, I don't think it was my natural makeup. I don't think its anyone's natural makeup to be a violent brawler.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I'm one of those writers who can't talk about what they're working on. The entire four years I was writing 'House of Sand and Fog,' my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.

That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.