“I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore.”

When I started I would have called myself an artist but the discipline I chose in art was music and text.

I’m pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.

Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

I worked probably fewer jobs than most people, or fewer real soul-killing jobs than other people. I’ve been a typist, a typesetter, a keyliner, cappuccino-maker. I think I’ve been pretty lucky.

It is interesting to be here and to see that for certain actors they have to live in a way that you think of nobody living anymore except for in small towns. They have such elaborate double lives.

For ‘King Cole’s American Salvage,’ I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars.

I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it’s something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets.

I think it gets uncomfortable when you try to act like you didn’t just tell a joke that bombed.

So maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I’m interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

In a regular class I don’t focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

That was a mistake, I guess, going out to California. They have these things called guidance counselors in high school. They drink a lot of herbal tea.

We know that we need to explore desire in fiction – many say that the only way a story exists is that a character feels a strong desire – and nature is the place where creatures act on their desires in the most pure way imaginable.

To be good, you need to believe in what you’re doing.

We are all capable of change and growth; we just need to know where to begin.

Who among us would ask our children for a loan, so we could spend money we do not have on things we do not need?

I will always prefer a hardback book, but I’m drawn to digital because it’s so easy to acquire them when I’m having a need-to-read moment.

President Obama came to visit me in the hospital. He said, ‘I wish you were still in the Senate; I need your help.’ I’m not certain I can help on everything. Maybe some things.

You know I don’t think we need the Republicans to steal family values from us.

Someday I’m gonna be famous. Do I have talent, well, no. These days you really don’t need it.

I remember getting in the elevator for my audition and there was a guy next to me who had a backpack full of props and wigs and things, and I went, ‘Oh, my God, that guy is so prepared,