Then he almost but didn't say the two sentence he'd been meaning to say for years: part of me is made of glass, and also, I love you

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

When you're younger, it's all theoretical. It's all potential. As you get older, it becomes actual, and your life gets filled with unexpected complexity; some of it asked for, and some of it not. It becomes richer, I find.

lonely people are always up in the middle of the night.

I have a very strong sense of architecture in my novels. But at first it's sometimes like building a doorknob before you have a door, and a door before you have a room.

Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.

He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.