There's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it.

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

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

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

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.

Maybe that's what we look for in the people we love, the spark of unhappiness we think we know how to extinguish.

I did a lot of reading of the Bible and became fascinated with the idea of the Rapture. It's pretty wild. I hadn't heard of it until I was in college.