It's not the cheating. It's the hunger for an alternative. The refusal to accept unhappiness.

I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.

From a distance, it makes perfect sense that the people and the things you think will save you are the very ones that have the power to disappoint you most bitterly, but up close it can hit you as a bewildering surprise.

I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.

As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.

I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.

I no longer believe that just about everything is funny, if viewed from the proper angle.