I was, not an altar boy, but a reader of the Epistle, and I walked in on a nun and a priest furiously French kissing when I was in seventh grade. I walked in, saw it, and went, "No way," backed out, composed myself, and went back in, and it was still going on. And the experience of seeing that was actually very deep.

I grew up in Chicago on the South Side, and had a ton of freedom, just did whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. At the risk of sounding dopey, I would say it was blissful.

You can say you're a liberal and everybody laughs and it's a good time.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

I actually believe that a lot of what people call originality has to do with persistence in the craft.

Toni Morrison seems to have a lot of faith in people - that's what I mean by gentle power.

Certainly we're always rooting for our particular contingent moment to be a great one. Pain-free. But the more expansive vision has to include the idea that, even for us, sometimes our particular contingent moment is going to be horrific.