When I was a little boy, Marvin Hagler was my idol. He got no respect for most of his career. His fighting style was straight ahead. He took every shot thrown at him, and he kept punching back 'til he won. I honestly feel that's how I am. I take big shots from people. But I keep going.

I just started trying to figure out how to write [something] which was unlike anything anybody had ever seen, and once I felt like I had figured that out I tried to figure out what kind of book I could write that would be unlike anything anybody had ever seen. When I started writing A Million Little Pieces I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

When I see you, the World stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There's nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The World just stops, and it is a beautiful place, and there is only you.

We live in a world that's very fast, where we get bombarded with huge amounts of information very quickly, and I have tried to tailor my voice to the times, which I think, writers, over the course of history - many have always done.

Faith is the fool's excuse.

But all good things come to an end, often a sad angry miserable end. The cause for such an end can usually be whittled down to one of three things: money, sickness, love lost.

To say that you can't see echoes of the past in what I do would be absurd. Everything that has preceded me has affected me.