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

But I think this: that whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too. Not just my family now, but the others-the ones who have died...They're with me still. They're here...

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 like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.

So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

The evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.