As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.

When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.

That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write.

It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.

It's different being afraid when there's the hope it will amount to something.