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

It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.

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.

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.

It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.

Because, really, what was worse than lying wide-awake in the dark, watching your life drip away, one irreplaceable minute after another?

My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.