I never could figure out how those people like Bukowski could be both carousers and writers at the same time, because to me writing takes as much destructive energy as it takes to be a really good professional drunk.

I don't think anybody deals well with tragedy or grief, but maybe my characters are particularly bad at it. Which is why I love them.

I guess I'm curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I'm also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years.

You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.

I usually have more than one thing I'm working on at once -- I've been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth. It's sort of freeing: I can say I'm abandoning this thing that I hate forever and I'm moving on to something that's good. I'll find that I'll go back to [the other project] in a day or a week and like it again. But that moment of wanting to trash something -- that Virginia Woolf moment when you have to be stopped from filling your pocket with stones -- comes pretty regularly for me. Switching is probably a good thing.

There are all kinds of strange threads in American culture, and places where sympathy is extended and places where it isn't, and places where outrage is extended and places where it's not. It's this constantly shifting barrel of eels.

In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love.