My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.

I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.

Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.

Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.

It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.

Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.

Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.

Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.