The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

For many people it's Facebook, or sports on TV, whatever it is. I have my own demons that I battle. But whatever they are, you wish you could not do them. For most of us it's "I cannot get off Facebook." But imagine that your demon has you living on the street. I don't think those compulsions and obsessions are that different.

This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought: you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life.

He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

Who isn't crazy sometimes? Who hasn't driven around a block hoping a certain person will come out; who hasn't haunted a certain coffee shop, or stared obsessively at an old picture; who hasn't toiled over every word in a letter, taken four hours to write a two-sentence email, watched the phone praying it will ring; who doesn't lay awake at night sick with the image of her sleeping with someone else?

The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.