If you wanted to pursue some kind of artistic pursuit and you had another career, then you would definitely fall back on it because it would take so long. I never believed I could do two things at once. The jobs I had were minimum wage jobs that you wouldn't want to pursue for too long, or that couldn't really take over your life.

To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.

On the one hand I'm writing about somebody about whom I say in the book, "The only thing worse than being a statistic is being a statistical anomaly." So I'm writing about a particularly unlucky person. So that's a special type of hell, to be particularly unlucky.

I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon.

Friendships are an unforseeable burden.

Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice.

I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.