Detroit's a great music town. If your interaction with it was mainly musical, I'm sure you have a good opinion of the place.

You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.

A girl's not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it's sweet.

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.

I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.