If you cross-section anyone's life from one angle and then another, what constitutes goodness looks different each time. It's not an absolute.

I don't think virtue has a downside. I think human nature does.

When you write, you're supposed to go stand somewhere else for a while, see things from a perspective that's not in line with your own reflexive truths.

I've always hated quotation marks: they're ugly on the page and they classify the text for you, putting dialogue in one box and narration in another.

I have to trick myself into writing a story - impose some arbitrary constraint to distract me from the constraints of my past habits or my fear that I don't have much to say.

I think it's very hard to be sexually explicit and erotic - though there are writers, like K. M. Soehnlein, who are just brilliant at this.

You have to be able to play: this is spontaneous interaction, and it flexes all the creative muscles you need as a writer. And empathy is one of those muscles.

[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.

Embrace the gift of autumn

Envy is an envious person and truth they don't like to wear

I'm first and foremost interested in the story, the characters.

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.

Hey, I always say: if you want a quiet life, become a monk.

My mother playing the violin and my father and grandfather playing the piano, classical stuff.

There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won't stand for that.

The trouble with me is that I like to talk too much.