Early on, a story's meaning and rationale seem pretty obvious, but then, as I write it, I realize that I know the meaning/rationale too well, which means that the reader will also know it - and so things have to be ramped up.

Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.

When you talk about a reader being emotionally moved, a feeling of empathy, I think that comes out of that line-by-line respect for reader. That's actually where it all comes from.

Sometimes I just turn on the TV and I'm like, wait a minute, that guy [Donald Trump]? It's incredible that he did all those things and he still won. It's hard to process.

When I'm not writing, I tend to get depressed and a little bit surly. And then when I'm writing, suddenly I feel enlivened. Now the only thing as I'm getting older that I notice is that it's a pattern.

You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.

Success makes opportunities and so many of those "opportunities" are actually exemptions - from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.