I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.

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.

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

She told her therapist it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of family and friends, loving it for a week or two, and then feeling trapped, dying to return to school, missing her roommates and her cute new boyfriend, the classes and the parties and the giggly talks before bed, understanding for the first time that that was her real life now, that this, despite everything she'd ever loved about it, was finished for good.

I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.

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

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