Everything we do, I'd imagine, influences everything we will do.

If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life.

On a good day I write, all day.

That Dick Cheney is pro-torture surprises no one; he freely admits it.

That soldiers do terrible things during wartime should not surprise us.

When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family.

You come to realize people are not simple.

Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are. It's not a matter of getting over anything; we have to make the best of it.

I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually.

In life you get one take, and it's perfect. It's strange, afterwards you might think I shouldn't have reacted that way, but that's the way you reacted. That's your take; that's all you get.

My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.