There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.

Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.

Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose.

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn’t come with plots; it’s messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can’t have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense.

You will feel discouraged; you will lose confidence in your abilities; you will be bored with the characters–and the only way to overcome these obstacles is to write your way through them. And writing always works.

I was reading for understanding. I wanted to do to a reader what Salinger did for me.

Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done.