It´s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard, ..., because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans.

Life is serious but art is fun!

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.

We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it - and reward it in all manner of ways.

Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

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.