I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.

Owen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

So, I don't work in terms of real time. I don't work in a timely fashion.

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

The book works better if I know everything I can about the ending. Not just what happens, but how it happens and what the language is; not just the last sentence, but enough of the sentences surrounding that last sentence to know what the tone of voice is. I imagined it as something almost musical. Then you are writing toward something; you know the sound of your voice at the end of the story. That's how you want to sound in those final sentences: the degree that it is uplifting or not, the degree that it is melancholic or not.