A lot of my characters in all of my books have a self-destructive urge. They'll do precisely the thing that they know is wrong, take a perverse delight in doing the wrong thing.

I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie.

After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.

If you work at comedy too laboriously, you can kill what's funny in the joke.

I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?

I'll tell you one thing, though. It's a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.

Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.