If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.

The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.

You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.

Sleep is over-rated. Have you ever noticed how it's always recommended to people anybody with half a brain can see need to wake up?

I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.