I really believe that fiction functions best when stories are allowed to develop in an organic way, so I didn't set out to deliver a specific message.

How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

Fear is ... a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do.

Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

But the past is long, and the future is short.

It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction.

We were a different kind of Christian, the quiet, reasonable kind, a breed embarrassed by the mention of miracles.

I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.

To some degree we all live with uncertainty. We have no control over the future. Yet we carry on, we persevere, because, I guess, it's the way we're made.

My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.

A person has to be comfortable in his or her own skin.

No man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire.

We cannot hand our faith to one another. ... Even in the Middle Ages when faith was theoretically uniform it was always practically individual.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

My desire was never to be famous. It was to try and create something interesting musically if I could.

The last to learn of gossip are the parties concerned

If you want to empower anyone else in your life, you need to start living the most empowered version of yourself first!

If I was in a horrorfilm I’d die first, because I would have no idea what’s going on.

I've got a great wife, a great life.

I feel like the earth, astonished at fragrance borne in the air, made pregnant with mystery from a drop of rain.