I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic. That's the world I write about...the world I live in.

Now is almost always the better choice. You never know about later.

When most of us talk to our dogs, we tend to forget that they're not people.

I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.

All I meant was that people take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. And some places have a way of magnifying your demons, or of, I don't know, giving them pep pills.

Thanks to Granna, Werner and Walter had grown up to be highly functioning, productive citizens - but if you were to ask Walter, Werner had a far easier time of it and lived his life with the sanctified nonchalance of those who will do anything to avoid dissecting their souls.

I love meeting booksellers and readers and hearing how they've read and received my stories. Often I'm surprised by which characters they've loved best, what scenes have stayed with them, what connections they've felt between my characters' lives and theirs.