I don't really think of my narrator in terms of gender. I think of them much more in basic emotional terms. As an author, you either love yer peeps or you don't. There's no such thing as a "masculine voice" or a "feminine voice". Men and women think and speak and act in, like, a zillion different ways. Also, as a gross generalization: women tend to live closer to their feelings than men.

You've got all these parents who are projecting their pathologies of fear onto their kids and those kids are understandably messed up. Tragedies happen and that you have to allow kids to experience their own fear and guilt and sorrow. It's the cover-up that really screws people over. Unfortunately, America specializes in cover-ups.

I want to view my own efforts to write a novel as a function of my own artistic aspirations rather than a good career move. And I need to learn how to commit to characters for a longer time, to confront the limits of my own capacities for attention and compassion. That's what a writing career does, in the best instance: it allows you to keep after what you can't do.

I have a hard time defending the production of candy, given that it is basically crack for children and makes them dependent in unwholesome ways.

At the end of night, before you close your eyes, be content with what you've done and be proud of who you are.

To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.

Football offers us a sanitized spectacle of combat that has a clear resolution, which we need more and more today given our incoherent overseas "wars."