I like to know the places I write about. I feel like it helps me ground the novel. My novels are 'realistic novels,' but they can also be fantastical, so it's nice to have a setting that grounds them a little bit.

Why don’t we break up? I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do.

Grateful to be a little boat, full of water, still floating.

In general-like not just in fiction but in life-it doesn't work out well when someone imagines someone else as a manic pixie dream girl or an Edward Cullen or anything other than a full, complex human being. That said, while I've tried to reflect that in my books, I don't think I've always succeeded, because I am always running up against my own insufficiencies and biases etc.

And so much depends, I told Augustus, upon a blue sky cut open by the branches of the trees above. So much depends upon the transparent G-tube erupting from the gut of the blue-lipped boy. So much depends upon the observer of the universe.

If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms. Do me a favor and shoot me.

If you don't say the honest thing, it never becomes true.