As a young kid I assumed that everybody was sort of on the same wavelength as I was and then I found out in a lot of small ways that that wasn't the case. It's sort of a mixed blessing. My mind is like a puppy. It goes all over. I guess writing fiction was a way of harnessing that. I could hook a puppy up to a treadmill and get something out of it.

So here's something I know to be true, although it's a little corny, and I don't quite know what to do with it.

Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel. Do not like.

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.

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

When you're embarking on a piece of writing, the anxiety is just too much, especially when you're young and you're trying to figure out if this is your thing or not. You feel like, "if I don't write a good story, I gotta get going to law school!"

Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.