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

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.

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

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.

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.

One of the reasons I’ve felt so connected to poetry throughout the years is because it’s the only art form that has breath built into it. And I need that breath now. I need that breath so much. So, yes, it is a refuge for me. Absolutely.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

A lot of the questions that anyone would naturally have about their family, you’ll get much of the answers for, or at least hints to where it will go, in the future.

Poems have always been a place for questions for me. Not answers. And I have a lot of questions these days.

The answers are questions in disguise, every new answer giving rise to new questions.

It is not enough for me to ask question; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?

Think about the answers of the questions that have not yet been asked! When they are asked, you will have the answers ready!

To answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.