I wanted to write something that would be a comedy in the sense of making people feel happier when they finish it than they did when began it.

The imagination and the place that dreams come from is so huge and so important. I'm trying to write about the real world, in that I'm trying to write about whatever it is the experience that makes us human, the things that we have in common.

It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.

I couldn't get you to the ocean, but there was nothing stopping me bringing the ocean to you.

I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.

It stared at them, and it paused for a hundred years, which transpired in a dozen heart beats.