I feel that in the past, my style has shown itself to be capable of handling dark and light in the same paragraph, or even in the same sentence. That's something I almost take for granted. I think it was more a concern to get the details right and persuasively recreate the world I was trying to write about.

A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.

[While writing], I'll go anywhere I find that is quiet, has no internet. I have a big internet problem.

I don't do a lot of foisting, because when it comes to books I don't really like to be foisted upon.

When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, 'In everything but sexual preference.

The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors.

The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.