There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love.

I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.

Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.

The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

It never takes longer than a few minutes, when they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That's what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.

But the first lie in the series is the one you make with the greatest trepidation and the heaviest heart.

A true storyteller is really good at writing himself into a corner and then finding a way out of that corner