I've been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.

I want saner gun laws. I think all these automatic weapons should be banned, big clips and handguns should be banned. As far as I'm concerned, shotguns and hunting weapons are all that we should allow in America.

My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.

Very early you come to the realization that nothing will ever take you away from yourself.

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses -- those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again.