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.

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

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.

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

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.

I was an English major in college, I went to a creative-writing program, and all my life, I really read and thought about fiction as a craft and an art form. I feel like I know a lot about it, and can trust my instincts.

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