I am not alone in bearing grudges against reviewers who have doomed a book's chances because they've missed the point, the tone, everything.

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.

Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it.