The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.

I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early.

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn't like?

Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.

I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.