And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me.

I think teenagers bring a lot of intellectual sophistication. They're wrestling with big questions. It's just that, a lot of times they do that separately from adults.

When I think about [characters], I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that's how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what's interesting about us happens in the context of other people.

My responsibility is to try to tell true stories. To me a true story is always hopeful, but never simply, uncomplicatedly happy.

And people are moody, dude. You gotta get used to living with people.

I didn't want to see them lower him into the ground in the spot he'd picked out with his dad, and I didn't want to see his parents sink to their knees in the dew-wet grass and moan in pain.

The marks humans leave are too often scars.