I really wanted to be a musician, but it turned out I had no sense of time.

Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

I was an English major in college, I went to a creative-writing program, and all my life, I really read and thought about fiction as a craft and an art form. I feel like I know a lot about it, and can trust my instincts.

I write about kids growing up, I write a lot about schools and parents, and all of my experiences with those things have been suburban experiences.

If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.

He'd never had to make the adjustments and compromises other people accepted early in their romantic careers; never had a chance to learn the lesson that Sarah taught him everyday--that beauty was only a part of it, and not even the most important part, that there were transactions between people that occurred on some mysterious level beneath the skin, or maybe even beyond the body.

To this day, she’s still sad. Because there’s not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I’m just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn’t hurt me at all.