I admit that for me love goes deeper than the struggle, or maybe what I mean is, love is the deeper struggle.

Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.

A book does not discriminate against any reader. All are welcome at the table of literature.

It doesn't make any sense. If the SIM are policemen, secret or not, shouldn't we trust them instead of being afraid of them?

Reading is a way to take in the difficult situations and understand them. The whole point of reading a book in class is to have discussion about what these situations are like.

For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. 'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.

A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.