Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don't know.

We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.

He needs to go rub his soul against life.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.