“Mostly, I think people are fake. Well, what do you expect? The fake world we live in conspires to make us all fakes.”

If you want to be a writer, you don’t want to live in a comfortable place.

The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.

I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get–and never would get.

We have this huge discourse on family in this country, but no one deconstructs it the same way. People talk about “the American family.” The right wing has this thing – Focus on the Family. What the hell is that?

The heart can get really cold if all you’ve known is winter.

I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.

I bring my best instincts to my work. For instance – and I come by this naturally, or I think I do – I am a very good judge of character.

But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.

I didn’t think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.

I don’t want to just discuss the issues – I want family to be a real part of the character of the novels I write, and I don’t like to write things that feel like issue books.

I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.

You are thirst and thirst is all I know

I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.

Absent parents aren’t abusive per se. They’re neglectful. They love in a very imperfect way. There are parents like that, and they do love their daughters and sons, but they’re not parents in the way that we might think of it.

Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.

I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.

You can’t fake anything. If you’re honest and true and you love something, and you put that energy into it, people can usually feel it on the other side.

One of the worst things you can give to your people is someone you’re not.

They’re all fake belts. To be honest, I think real belt is Tony Ferguson’s.

A wicked wife, a false friend, a saucy servant and living in a house with a serpent in it are nothing but death.

You can get by on charm for about 15 minutes. After that, you better know something.

Treachery, though at first very cautious, in the end betrays itself.

If you have written really well, people will swear that it happened to you.

Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, And ev’n with Paradise devise the snake; For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blackened – Man’s forgiveness give and take!