My mind leaps to my theory about presidents - that there are two kinds, ones who have a lot of sex and the others who start wars. In short - and don'….

I'm very interested in compassion - compassion for oneself and others. I write about very complicated characters and experiences and try to do it wit….

What draws me to family... if I were a psychiatrist, I'd say an enormous amount of unresolved personal material. If I were an anthropologist, I'd say….

The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable..

You really can't write well if you're thinking about what the reviewers might say..

The struggle is how to write optimistically when the world we're living in is not inherently optimistic. I love the idea of the family from the most ….

Philip Galanes makes his debut with a novel that is both heartbreaking and deftly comic, the story of a young man struggling with his most primitive ….

Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?.

I think about how truly interesting and odd it is that when a woman marries, traditionally she loses her name, becoming absorbed by the husband's fam….

Sometimes you can do things for others that you can't do for yourself..

The weird thing about having your birthday on a school day is that by the time you get to be ten, or eleven for sure, no one at school knows it's you….

It's my policy not to review funerals..

Birthday parties make me nervous as hell. They're one of those things where you're forced to be happy. And even if you're totally depressed, you're g….

It annoys the hell out of me when people say, This is the kitchen, and this is the bathroom. What am I, Helen Keller? I mean, it's pretty obvious whe….

A lot of people get flipped out if you're quiet. They say stuff like, What are you thinking? And if they don't start interrogating you, they start ta….

If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks..

I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud..

I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night..

I thought a lot about Nixon's personal history and the changes in America during his lifetime and tried to craft stories, which I thought reflected s….

Every family has a story that it tells itself, that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some par….

I'd say our ability to supersize emotions are American-made special effects. In European countries, people mostly stay close to home and whatever rag….