My life is a reading list.

Along the (writing) way accidents happen, detours get taken... But these are not "divine" accidents; I don't believe in those. I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you'll recognize that and make the necessary revisions. The more you know about a book, the freer you can be to fool around. The less you know, the tighter you get.

…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.

Among adults – and among orphans – Wilbur Larch noted that delirious happiness was rare.

For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.