I've always been slow but I'm even slower now. I'm more into the waiting, or I guess I'm more patient about the waiting.

When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.

… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.

but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

The main character and the most important character are not always the same person - you have to know the difference.

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

I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.