Perhaps this is how you know you're doing the thing you're intended to: No matter how slow or how slight your progress, you never feel that it's a waste of time.

Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.

I feel like if you read something, and it makes you so curious about a topic that you then go read something else, that's exciting.

To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you're not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.

If you’re a parent in 2013, you have to get your hands on this book. Wise, engrossing, and so real that I fear Senior has been spying inside my house, All Joy is a must-read for those of us whose lives have been enriched and derailed by having kids.

She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.