I'm not in the service business.

My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.

Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

Most television shows are going to require an actor sign up from four to six years, but an anthology show really amounts to five or six months at the most. I thought serious actors might be attracted to that.

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

The Atlantic really gave me my writing career - even just the conviction to be a writer.