...nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something. - John Irving

In this dirty-minded world you are either somebody's wife or somebody's whore, or fast on your way to becoming one or the other.

a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around who's enough like yourself to understand you.

I write repeatedly—against my will—of those things I fear most happening. Losing a loved one, losing a parent, losing a child. I'm in terror of losing a child. It's never happened to me, but I am clearly compelled to write about it over and over again, and in a way I think, psychologically at least, this says more about me autobiographically as a novelist than the fact that Danny Angel goes to the Iowa Writers Workshop and has Kurt Vonnegut as a teacher, which I also did.