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.

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

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

My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them.

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.

Every minute we were together, I felt like I was wandering in the dark through a strange house, groping for a light switch. And then, whenever I found one and turned it on, the bulb was dead.