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

This was a place where tattoos outnumbered teeth.

I'd never had money growing up, and it's never been that important to me, except maybe to take our kids on a nice vacation or something like that.

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.

The most annoying and full- of- crap thing a writer says is, I write only for myself, I don't care if anyone reads it. A writer without a reader doesn't exist.

I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.

I love stories. When I'm writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we're cavemen, we're sitting around the fire, and I'm telling you stories. If I bore you, you're probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head.