Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do..

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….

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

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….

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

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….

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….

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….

It's my policy not to review funerals..

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 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….

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….

I really don't watch enough TV to know about the impact. In my experience as a TV writer, I would say is the exact opposite - it's very constricted, ….

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 ….

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

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 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….

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 ….

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

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?.