The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, ther would be no need for fiction.

At the end of the day, perhaps the best argument against capital punishment may be that it is an issue beyond the limited capacity of government to get things right.

Life is simply experience; for reasons not readily discerned, we attempt to go on.

I really do believe that chance favours a prepared mind. Wallace Stegner, who was one of my teachers when I was at Stanford, preached that writing a novel is not something that can be done in a sprint. That it's a marathon. You have to pace yourself. He himself wrote two pages every day and gave himself a day off at Christmas. His argument was at the end of a year, no matter what, you'd got 700 pages and that there's got to be something worth keeping.

The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots.