Most people ended up, after only a couple of months, so far away from where they'd intended to go, stuck in some barbed underbrush of a quagmire when they'd meant to head straight to the ocean.

In America, people of a certain age ask, 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' In my house you were more likely to be asked, 'Where were you when you first read 'The Catcher In The Rye?

His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerged charred doves.

I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.

Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you.

What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?

It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.