People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.

I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.

...I will continue to underscore that I don't think authorial intent is all that important to a reading experience, and I certainly don't think the job of reading is to divine authorial intent.

We didn't talk much. But we didn't need to.

Videogame players essentially choose whether to win the game or to die heroically. There's a certain glory in both.

I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.

You can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can't say that Alabamans as a people are duly afraid of deep fryers.