For me, the process of writing a novel happens mostly in your head before you actually start writing.

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.

Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.

I love to write when I feel like everybody else is asleep and when I feel like the world is kind of empty in some ways. I find, oddly enough, that I write about loneliness and isolation a lot.

I've never been able to sleep very much, even when I was a kid. I used to hate being forced to lay in bed in the darkness, and just shifting in bed and staring at the shadows.

I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids.