Do not be confused by what the natural world knows: We are all, in our own way, completely and totally alone. If love is real, it is complete and total failing of the intellect. It is utter self-destruction. It is pandemonium.

Where do you go when you die? Ha ha. Go on, go on and tell her, Billy." Billy smiles. "You become a little voice in someone's ear telling them that things will be alright.

Being decent is the only thing that matters in a terrible world like this.

The longer human beings exist, it seems, the less likely we are to choose to be brave.

I'm kind of interested in learning to learn and grow and challenge myself. I think I've been very fortunate in that my books are pretty different from one novel to the next. There's a lot of things that are similar but in terms of tone and the scale and how they interact with history and just the different styles as well.

I was getting close to thirty and was trying on the idea of becoming more mature. I was reading more. I had gone out and bought a lot of shirts.

A book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have the chance to engage in active imagining, translating word to image, connecting these images to memories, dreams, and larger ideas. Television, film, even the stage play, have already been imagined for us, but the book, in whatever form we choose to interact with it, forces us to complete it.