I think people are sometime reluctant to read outside of their own race. This is heartbreaking.

When I'm writing flawed characters, I just think about my own flaws.

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.

For me as a writer, it was understanding that we're so far behind in our way of dealing with death. We put someone in the ground, we bury them or we burn them, and then we're supposed to just move on and kind of get over it.

You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.

I love slow readers. And readers who think about what I've written, think about how it's written - and copy me!

No matter how big you get, it's still okay to cry because everybody's got a right to their own tears.