Whatever you love is beautiful; love comes first, beauty follows. The greater your capacity for love, the more beauty you find in the world.

My mom was paranoid about my safety.

My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life.

A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system.

Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.

If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.