 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. |
| When I was a kid... I needed to belong. |
| Love stories are probably all I've ever been able to write or want to write. |
| When I was a kid, I was surrounded by girls: older sisters, older girl cousins just down the street... except for an older boy named Vito who threw rocks. Each year I would wish for a baby brother. It never happened. |
| Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love. |
| I love the most the students with troubled lives. |
| Human behavior in the midst of hardship caught my attention very early on, and my first stories were all pictures, no words. |
| I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read. |
| As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow. |
| I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing. |
| The roundness of life's design may be a sign that there is a presence beyond ourselves. |
| I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life. |
| Love comes in far more shapes and sizes than what the family-values crowd condones, of course. |
| I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned. |
