I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?

I think the darker aspect of my fiction-or anybody's fiction-is by its very nature somehow easier to talk about.

Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.

Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.

As I drift back into sleep, I can't help thinking that it's a wonderful thing to be right about the world. To weigh the evidence, always incomplete, and correctly intuit the whole, to see the world in a grain of sand, to recognize its beauty, its simplicity, its truth. It's as close as we get to God in this life, and reside in the glow of such brief flashes of understanding, fully awake, sometimes for two or three seconds, at peace with our existence. And then back to sleep we go.

America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.