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.

My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.

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 was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.

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

I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.