I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.

[I remember going] to a hotel gym at six o'clock in the morning, and the television was on, and it's some drama in which two men have clearly kidnapped a woman. They're interrogating her, and they put a plastic bag over her head. They're suffocating her, and I'm thinking, It's six o'clock in the morning! Why does anybody need to see this? How can I find the off switch?

I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.

If you want to write and can't figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned.

The hardest piece of nonfiction I ever wrote isn't anywhere close to the easiest piece of fiction I never wrote.

No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do