Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

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

"If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity." Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad."

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

HBO is really famous for hiring good people and staying out of their way until they ask for help, or need it. And that reputation is earned.

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

Knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things.