I came to the US as an immigrant and I recall vividly those first few years in California, the brief time we spent on welfare, and the difficult task of assimilating into a new culture.

I've read that if an avalanche buries you and you're lying there underneath all that snow, you can't tell which way is up or down. You want to dig yourself out but pick the wrong way, and you dig yourself to your own demise.

I give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift.

Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.

The things that have always drawn me to the craft of writing is character, it's story, it's something that becomes like a pebble in my shoe, a voice that I just can't get rid of, and I've got to see it through.

Whether you do something or decide to do nothing, either way, you are making a moral choice. And I hope people make the right one.

Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life.