Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don't mean that you can't also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.

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.

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

The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.

Our memory is a monster; you forget it - it does not.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

If I had to be anything," he told her, "I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.