The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

I find that even small changes sometimes jog you out of a mental rut.

I have actual dreams of Bruce Springsteen calling me up on stage to wear a bandanna and play rhythm guitar next to Little Steven.

I no longer believe that just about everything is funny, if viewed from the proper angle.

I really wanted to be a musician, but it turned out I had no sense of time.

I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.

I was a garbage man in New Jersey in summers during college at Yale. Everybody else got to go to Switzerland and I got to go to the dump.

I was also known as Frodo because I was an early adopter of 'The Lord of the Rings.'

I write about kids growing up, I write a lot about schools and parents, and all of my experiences with those things have been suburban experiences.

I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.

It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.

My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.

My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant - we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.

When I was writing 'The Abstinence Teacher,' I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.

When things don't go well, it helps to think of yourself as a genius and the rest of the world as a bunch of idiots.

A screenwriter heard me read from my novel 'The Wishbones' when it was still in progress and mentioned me to some producers in Hollywood. They called, and I told them I had a novel in my drawer about a high school election that goes haywire. They asked to take a look, and my life changed pretty dramatically as a result.

I did a lot of reading of the Bible and became fascinated with the idea of the Rapture. It's pretty wild. I hadn't heard of it until I was in college.

I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love.