Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience.

I'm a morning person, which is a hideous thing to be. No one likes morning people, not even other morning people.

My family is really, really Southern - I had two uncle Bubbas, and grandparents that we called Big Mama and Big Daddy.

There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is.

We become comfortable saying that there's nothing new, and then something like Malarky comes along, which is new and old and different and familiar, but ultimately itself, comfortable in its own skin, wise and smart and crazy-sexy or maybe sexy-crazy-well, you just have to read it to understand. It's a novel that sets its own course, sure and steady, even when it seems like it might be about to go over the edge of the world.

Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.