Watch out for people who call themselves religious; make sure you know what they mean - make sure they know what they mean!

But who can distinguish between falling in love and imagining falling in love? Even genuinely falling in love is an act of the imagination.

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.

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

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.

I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

This is what self-centered religion does to us: it allows us to use it to further our own ends.