My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.

I would like to give you more of my heart,but there is nothing more I can give you. I gave you everything and you crushed it into bits.

I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.

I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.

The Dark Dark is a far slower project, clearly, and that's a relief. I look for slowness anywhere I can find it.

I became a writer because I am the youngest of six children. I listen; I observe. I'm camouflaged as a moth. Mothers are unseen. It helps me write.

In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

I am surprisingly optimistic, though lately that's been hard to maintain. Art and slow, small, close gestures help remind me of my optimism.

The lion's share of my work is revision, 85%? I revise forever, combing over lines, listening and listening to them in different hours and moods so that I feel they are finally right for me.

There's a voice when I write. I speak everything aloud. My family is so accustomed to me talking to myself that often times they don't answer me when I am trying to speak to one of them.

Why do the living assume the dead know better than we do?Like they gained some knowledge by dying, but why wouldn’t they just be the same confused people they were before they died?

Aviation records don't fall until someone is willing to mortgage the present for the future.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.

We have nothing to fear for the future, except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us, and His teaching in our past history.

Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.

All it takes is one person in any generation to heal a family's limiting beliefs.

Fridays are the hardest in some ways: you’re so close to freedom.

I love worldbuilding. It's as much fun for me as writing itself. It's like a hobby of mine.

Well, sanity, I suppose, is getting people to see the world your way.

Innovations that drive lasting economic growth emerge from the most advanced science, mathematics and technology.

There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.