I always wished to be a better planner. It seems more elegant, while my trial and error process is more akin to someone scratching an awful case of poison oak.

It was important to buy into the fact that the nine hundred pages an end-reader never sees are just as valuable as the ones that are bound and placed on the shelf.

I always joke that every novel is really about the same thing: one person’s struggle against society.

I just thought it was important that people knew right from the jump that I’ve got problems. But in all seriousness, that’s a huge part of my writing process.

The more we’re doing to ensure we’re following our joy and passion, that’s when we really start to put the gas in our lives.

If Dante was writing The Divine Comedy in 2013, he might very well have set part of it in the suburbs.

I’m not a gamer. But I am very aware of the escapism of drugs. In my mind those kind of do the same thing. They dull us to the aches and pains of our status quo.

I’m a very tactile learner, so I need analog index cards, moving them all about, trying out various sequences for the book’s architecture.

I don’t think escaping is necessarily a problem, but we can get addicted to almost anything. If you’re craving being in this other reality and you don’t want to participate in your own reality, those are the times we have to start asking ourselves difficult questions.

I want to be the kind of adult that keeps learning. I want to always be open to new experiences.