I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.

There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.

Owen meany who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water... remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain untouchable.

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything--maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.

No adult in my family would ever tell me anything about who my father was. I knew from an older cousin - only four years older than I am - everything, or what little I could discover about him.