I think if someone could demonstrate to me that fiction did no good, I would still do it, because I think it does good for me.

As a kid, I had a real fascination with perverse, off-color, and kind of risky things, and I also had a very sanctimonious Catholic, purist side.

If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.

Whether you're eighteen or sixty, in a certain way, whatever you know is valid.

...smile first, then speak.

I think something that I can't name about our media has made us move away from that kind of specificity and that kind of curiosity.

I sometimes imagine a great writer as a sort of God-surrogate: the writer is doing his or her human-best to emulate what God might think of is, if God was inclined to observe some human beings and present their activities in the form of a narrative.