I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.

But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren't real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a checkbook, an oil change, a sunset behind a mountain, laughter at a kitchen table, too much wine, a chipped tooth, and a screaming child.

It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.

The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It's the doorway through which they can't return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.

There are two types of men in this world--one is looking for a woman to make his life complete and the other is looking for a woman to join his complete life.

I am a person of faith, so I come from a community that's involved in 360,000 churches across the country, that is an institution that could, in a relatively short period of time, provide hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of positive male role models.

The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won't make a story meaningful, it won't make a life meaningful either.