It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.

Try to get your characters into interesting trouble. Allow your characters to misbehave. Let them stay out after 11.

There is no weather in malls.

The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.

You are a real find and you keep me satisfied, up to a point. After all, I'm a malcontent and you can't change that.

A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.

Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.