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 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.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

I know very few writers who outline fully before they start. It just doesn't seem possible to do, because so many things don't come out until you're absolutely knee-deep in the world.

She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.

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 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.