I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.

The evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.

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.

Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words.

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.