I grew up in a household of women, they ran the show, they kept it all together. I credit my ability to write in female voices, as well as male, with having grown up with older sisters in a neighborhood largely populated by girls.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.

I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.

I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.

Life is a whoopee cushion, a chair pulled away just as you were taking a seat.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.