“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 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 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.

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

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.

I think writing books is a way for me to work out certain issues. I write about what matters to me, always.

If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.

Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.

It’s a complex thing when you’re writing a novel, because so much of it is conscious and planned and deliberate, and so much of it is not, and it has to be a dance between the conscious and the unconscious.

It gave me something that is really important to me. So I always think about my faith. I always have it, and sometimes I can’t talk about it, and sometimes I can. I am like an adolescent in that way. Teens are asking questions: who is God and what does it mean to have faith?

Words were different when they lived inside of you.

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

We cannot discuss human rights, when we are denying people the right to live.

No discussion between two persons can be of any use, until each knows clearly what it is that the other asserts.

I grew up in a family in which political issues were often discussed, and debated intensely.

Until bitcoin came along, the *character* of money was left undiscussed.

I don’t like discussing cricket off the field.

Everything is plainer when spoken than when unspoken.

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.