Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows.

He felt ... a suspicion-no, a conviction-than he had been abandoned, forgotten, and that no one in the whole world cared or would ever care enough about him to really find out what he was like and what his dreams were. He was an outcast, a creature somehow vastly different from all other people, an object of scorn and derision, an outsider, secretly loathed and ridiculed by everyone who met him, even by those few who professed to love him.

Life's mysterious, strange, and full of wonders - and only a fool withdraws from it willingly and lets it pass him by.

At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.

I never have lunch because it makes me foggy-headed.

The world is a very complex and interesting place and that is what I really want my fiction to say: wake up to how amazing the world is.

I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.