I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.

They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.

That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.

... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.

People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.