Maybe there are some things we were put on this earth not to know.

Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

Patrick Kenzie asking a bemused waitress for a newspaper in smalltown USA. 'It's like a homepage without a scroll button?'

When I was young, I asked my priest how to get to heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God told His children;'You are sheep among wolves, be wise as the serpent, yet innocent as doves.

I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world - and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.

I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.