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

Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer - that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you'd left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn't love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.

The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."

I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.

He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.

I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.