Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.

The pursuit of greatness means that laziness has no place in your life.

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

Each divorce is the death of a small civilization.

My attraction to story is a ceaseless current that runs through the center of me. My inexhaustible ardor for reading seems connected to my hunger for storylines that show up in both books and in the great tumbling chaos of life.

Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.

My mother raised me to be a writer.