A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.

I'm almost completely without family and it's a very odd feeling in life. I have no children.

The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through.

Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn't then it's not love at all.

Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

My father cared about the world he lived in, and so he admitted his confusion about his place in America because he didn't want me to make the same mistake in my life.