girls forbidden to dance would only attract husbands with bad complexions and sunken chests.

That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

I'm constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.

I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.