When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.

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

The interesting part about the writing process is that you can never see all the way to the end, not if something is happening over the course of a year and a half, or two years.

He'd never had to make the adjustments and compromises other people accepted early in their romantic careers; never had a chance to learn the lesson that Sarah taught him everyday--that beauty was only a part of it, and not even the most important part, that there were transactions between people that occurred on some mysterious level beneath the skin, or maybe even beyond the body.

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

If anything, he seemed a little lonely, all too ready to open his heart at the slightest sign of interst.