If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?
You have no idea what it is like to constantly disappoint people. You see it the moment you meet them. You see in their eyes that they expected something so entirely different, and here they are meeting... you.
Discovering the 'impossible' ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.
At school I was lazy. But I started working when I was 15, washing dishes at a local truck stop restaurant. I was really, really bored with school, and I wanted to get a job as fast as I could. School was just so easy. There was just no challenge to it.
Once religion has been dismissed by primarily an intellectual class of people, we lose the really useful social functions of religion... What replaces it might be worse than what we throw away.
When working, my diet degrades to pizza three times a day, because I don't want to distract myself from anything.
I write in a noisy, distracting world so the books can be read there.
I think in a way, you're doomed, once you can envision something. You're sort of doomed to make it happen. I've found that the moment I can envision leaving a relationship, that's usually the moment that the relationship starts to fall apart.
When I was little, my grandma used to get romance novels, and she would get hundreds of these, and she'd read a dozen a month.
My characters tend to be more dynamic because they're reaching that point in their lives where their old way of being is breaking down. They're conflicted by the idea that they don't know what's next. You could call it Kierkegaard's leap of faith, when you get tired of sort of reinventing yourself on a very superficial level.
The folks who read my books are so passionate about each one of them that the people making my movies are more afraid of my readership than they are of me.
For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.
Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
My books are always about somebody who is taken from aloneness and isolation - often elevated loneliness - to community. It may be a denigrated community that is filthy and poor, but they are not alone; they are with people.
My stories always have these twisted happy endings, and the boy always gets the girl.
I really love idiot, enlightened characters - these characters who fail to engage with the drama of their immediate circumstances; they fail to be reactive and enrolled by drama as it happens around them.
What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.
The first step to eternal life is you have to die.
A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.
