Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love. |
As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow. |
However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences-and I stray pretty far from mine-I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously. |
Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words. |
I didn't know any schizophrenics. The most valuable information I got was from people with the disease and their family members. |
I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned. |
I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing. |
I love the most the students with troubled lives. |
I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life. |
I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read. |
It's the most breathtakingly ironic things about living: the fact that we are all-identical twins included-alone. Singular. And yet what we seek-what saves us-is our connection to others. |
Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course. |
Love stories are probably all I've ever been able to write or want to write. |
Reading a novel is a highly personal experience, and I think different readers will take different things from it. |
The roundness of life's design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves. |