I think fiction is about small ambition, small failed ambition.

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

You have to be smart enough to see the world for yourself and honest. The whole book-publicity thing is not really honest, at base.

You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.

You're never so alive as after you thought you were going to die.

I work with wood a lot. I like building. I think of building. I would love to buy land on some water somewhere and build a house. That'd be nice.

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.