Yet for all the depression no one ever quit. When someone quit, we couldn't believe it. 'I'm becoming a rafting instructor on the Colorado River,' they said. 'I'm touring college towns with my garage band.' We were dumbfounded. It was like they were from another planet. Where had they found the derring-do? What would they do about car payments? We got together for going away drinks on their final day and tried to hide our envy while reminding ourselves that we still had the freedom and luxury to shop indiscriminately.

Humor is a very big part of life, and if you exclude humor from your book, you're not capturing a very important part of human experience.

I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.

All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.

You think I alienate myself from society? Of course I alienate myself from society. It’s the only way I know of not being constantly reminded of all the ways I’m alienated from society.

The thing is, for me, as a fiction writer, I don't think there's a finer testament to our lives than this thing that's being spurned - the emotional intelligence, the ethics, the beauty. It's all there. It's all so fully contained in a novel that succeeds. But at the same time, I understand the impulse to put away childish things.

We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up.