Updike and Bellow and Roth were my three favorite writers when I was young and throughout my life.

I know that there are people out there who believe we should get rid of all guns.

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.

I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

There was no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance of air. A kiss, another kiss.