I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.

I think the wave of social media rejection is coming. I think there will be a big reaction against it. It's just like sugar- - mean, I loved it as a kid.

What evil does first in the world, maybe, is distract us from our pursuit of goodness.

[Writing] is almost like those boats that sit really low in the water; they look kind of ugly. And then you get one of them up to 80 miles an hour and the hull comes up, and it's a beautiful thing. I'm okay with that for myself.

He was a father. That's what a father does.Eases the burdens of those he loves. Saves the ones he loves from painful last images that might endure for a lifetime.

I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.

I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714.