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

Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn't terribly painful.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

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.