Plot was always secondary in my mind.

The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I'd heard, images, words, metaphors.

I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.

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

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

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

Writing short stories was kind of like I was cheating the whole time, in some way. I went back and forth between writing the novels and sort of sneaking out to work on stories occasionally. These stories were written over the last 10 years or so, as I was taking breaks from the novels I've written.