If you want something, it will elude you. If you do not want something, you will get ten of it in the mail.

I was a kid who sometimes got in trouble because I couldn't keep my mouth shut, which turned out to be an advantage when I became an opinion columnist.

I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when I was 19 and my mother died, and one was when I was 31 and my first child was born. And that sort of gave me a kind of rebirth that I think has been invaluable to me as a novelist, in terms of seeing the world anew.

Over the last twenty years, we've changed the world just enough to make it radically different, but not enough to make it work.

My sister is a public school teacher. She makes far far less money than I do, and gets almost no public attention for her work. Yet I believe what she does is infinitely more important and more difficult than what I do.

I'm a Catholic of the New Testament, I'm not a Catholic of the hierarchy.

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.