When you like something and you're pretty good at it and you can make a living doing it, you don't ask why. You just count your blessings and go with it.

You can't have an up without a down, a right without a left, a back without a front - or a happy without a sad.

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

In short, the satisfaction of creating, not necessarily the process, always lifts my heart.

When I was seventeen, I worked as a counsellor at a co-ed sleep-away camp for eight weeks. I loved it but it could be harrowing - it was far too much responsibility for someone my age.

There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.