“If as a writer, you want to capture the world we live in, I think you have some responsibility to at least try to get at some of the ways we’ve chosen to govern ourselves.”

That is much of what I think the writer’s job is – to slow people down.

Finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon

Only the luckless, the petty or the deranged [end] up in court.

You try not to because it’s hard and at times shameful, but then when you read those pages over and you see they have no life to them so you throw them away and force yourself to be more honest.

Discovery is the joy.

So I suppose the answer is I see myself in all my characters, in their best moments and in their worst.

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about.

As I see it, my job as a writer isn’t to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

We live in a bureaucratic, atomized world, but the system is still run by human beings.

To give them the chance to notice the passage of time as experienced by others as a reminder of what it is like to be alive.

Because we are most often distracted from that. Massively distracted.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

Delve deeper into your dreams to capture the visualized, yet unseen.

Delve deeper into your dreams to capture the visualized, yet unseen.

It’s not my perfect performance that captures God’s attention. It’s my complete dependence on Him that He notices.

Something in your eyes captured my soul, and every night I see you in my dreams. You’re all I know. I can’t let go.

I don’t try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

Whether it be a reggae song, rock song, a love song, the main thing was just to, whatever I was feeling, to try to capture that emotion.

Everything is good as long as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death’s horses they run in span.