It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.

...There is a school of thought, a heresy from the madhouse of heresies in the ninth century, that says God is good and is in control of every individual thing that happens, every event, but that unfortunately the devil is in control of the timing.

Literature is humanity talking to itself.

It was a standard fantasy when you fell in love to imagine you could go back in time and find your beloved growing up, appear there, save him or her, get together as adolescents, by magic, and go on together, fighting for one another, into old age, never wavering.

It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.

The characters write the plot. Their natures do.

I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.