“Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?”

I can’t have composite characters. I can’t attribute dialogue to someone based simply on my memory and not based on notes taken at the time that the words were spoken.

It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.

For me, a lot of the humor comes not from innocence but from characters trying to figure out how to get what they need. I don’t try to be funny, but am relieved when an opportunity comes up for humor.

The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies.

As a teacher, I can help my students see what is working and not working. I can show them certain solutions.

I tend to think that we are all pretty much alike. We all feel despair. We all have problems with relationships.

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

To me exposition always contains tenderness.

I need to tell the things that are important but which don’t make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.

There are also so many emotional aspects to money – feelings of inadequacy, feelings of security. I am not sure if there needs to be more about money in fiction, but the absence of this aspect can make a story feel somehow frictionless and unreal.

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

Even within my stories, people hold opposing views.

Certainly the details of our life are unique. Spending time thinking of how I am different from someone else, however, does not tend to be very productive.

The tears loosen their memories so they can slide away. They cry at the life they have lost, and then they cry at everything they’ll forget.

I realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind.

Long gone are the days of the stylised old James Bond films with Roger Moore karate chopping his way through the bad guys – audiences are not going to buy it anymore.

It’s late at night and I can’t sleep.

I’m feeling like the music business is reaping what it’s sown. It’s going through what inevitably it was going to go through.

Eric Schlosser’s book on the economy and strategies of the fast-food business should be read by anyone who likes to take their children to fast-food restaurants.

With luck, a writer capable of producing both Slouching Towards Kalamazoo and The Blood of the Lamb will not remain unappreciated for long.

I think its important to engage them. And I think it’s important that we continue to fight for human rights, which is essential to denying the next generation of terrorists their recruits and this is a long-term fight we’re in when it comes to the war on terror.

People have been talking about multiverses as a philosophical idea for a long time. But the current incarnations in physics

I love to believe that there’s one god but there’s many different religions so there’s just the question of which long distance company you pick.