I have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven.

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.

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

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

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

I think I was always writing books that had very clear scenic structures. I do tend to write in scenes. I do tend to have a fair amount of dialogue. And I do tend to use stories that don't sprawl all over the place, that have a very sharp focus in terms of how they unfold in time.

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