Once you'd broken through that invisible barrier that separates one person from another, you were connected forever, whether you liked it or not.

I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.

I really wanted to be a musician, but it turned out I had no sense of time.

I was writing very early, like I was involved in our high school literary magazine, which was called 'Pariah.' The football team was the Bears, and the literary magazine was 'Pariah.' It was great. It was definitely a real sub-culture. But I wrote stories for them.

She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the choices the world seemed to be offering them.

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

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