You can go on like this for a very long time, and no one will notice. You keep thinking you're going to hit some sort of bottom, but I'm here to tell you: There is no bottom.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

So this was what it felt like to lose yourself. Again. To let go of your future and let it rise up and up until finally you couldn't see it anymore, and you knew that you had to start over.

I think we're always in some ways writing to the teachers who gave us early love.

I've had a lot of different lives. I was adopted, I grew up in Nebraska, and then I went to Northwestern... Then I had this really extraordinary, different life than my parents.

I guess I've been blessed with insomnia because I do a lot of my writing at night. Because I don't sleep as much as I probably should, I have that extra time to write weird stories and think odd thoughts.

I read a lot, but at the same time I'm not a particularly good or diligent or discriminating reader. I go through maybe close to a thousand or more books a year, but a lot of times I'll only read bits and pieces of any one individual text.