If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.

A seven-year-old girl can take only so many walks with her grandfather.

Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.

In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.