An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.

She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.

I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?

No matter what terror the earth could produce - winds, seas - a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world - no flower or stone - as a single hello from a human being.

Awkwardness is where tension is, and tension is where the story is. It's also where the comedy is, which I'm interested in; when it resolves it tends to resolve toward melancholy, a certain resignation, which I find interesting as well.

You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.