Some people tell me they would be afraid of my characters, but I tell those people [that] they meet these characters all the time. They just don't ca….

Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every oth….

I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they're not being written about much anymore. I'm very interested in people who are in a situation th….

I figure that I'm always going to be fine, one way or another, but I do worry about other people who have difficulty moving from one world to the nex….

I love writing about men. To get by in the world you have to know how men think. Not that all guys think alike, but women tend to think about more th….

Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar..

There were a lot of beautiful, thin people out there driving nice cars. It was a whole different experience being in L.A..

I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in t….

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous..

The great thing about fiction is that I don't have to settle on an answer to any troubling question, or even a solution. I hope that my stories serve….

Men didn't understand that you couldn't let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was s….

Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary..

Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come….

I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a go….

A Life in Men is a joyful, ambitious novel that is also an adventure traversing three continents, as well as a meditation on love, sex, and, most imp….

I didn't actually figure out how to get guidance, so I just decided to go to school at University of Southern California because they sent me a gloss….

I was unhappy and I couldn't figure out what was the matter. And he told me to go take a writing course. And I didn't even know that one could learn ….

The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work..

I can't personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write..

I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me..

I enjoy shooting. Around where I live, it's something you do for entertainment once in a while, you go out and shoot targets..