Even when the faith goes away, there's that space where you crave something bigger than yourself. For me, that's kind of where art came in, after that.

I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.

This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eilimate disparity. the traffic stops.

I'm repledging myself to human-scale values. As a fiction writer, the best data comes through the senses and is then processed through many revisions. We have to learn to be intelligent assessors of the data coming in to us and what it's doing to our mental process.

The idea of inclusion has become kind of a stone that we've passed our hand over so many times that it doesn't mean anything.

My heart goes out to him. Sort of. Because empathy depends on how you've spent your day.

I used to joke about this but I've recently realized that I really believe it: I spent many years training myself to write very slowly for pretty good money. So the idea of writing really quickly for free offends me.