What's so exciting and terrifying about the writing process is that it really is an act of exploration and discovery. With all of us, not just writers, there is a sort of knowledge of the other. We have a lot more in common than we realize, and I think writing is really a sustained act of empathy.

Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak's Broadway to Chicago.

I work out four days a week in the off-season, and in the warm, running weather months, I do five days. A push/pull regime of weightlifting, cycling, and the occasional Saturday or Sunday run with my oldest son, even if it's cold out.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live.

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.