Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star.

You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.

We sometimes drive ourselves crazy with how our books will be "seen," when in fact we already know what they're about, and where our obsessions are. If we can spin those obsessions into fiction, then there's a decent chance they will be "fiction-worthy," as you call it. The idea of the "sweep of ideas" is a complicated one.

Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.