I was trying to learn to write stories, and was reading O’Hara and Hemingway as a carpenter might look at an excellent house someone else has built.

No: she is one of us, and what she said and did on that April evening was, like the warm sunlit sky, enough: for me, for the end of winter, for the infinite possibilities of the human heart.

Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak’s Broadway to Chicago.

I’ve learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

What cracks had he left in their hearts? Did they love less now and settle for less in return, as they held onto parts of themselves they did not want to give and lose again? Or – and he wished this – did they love more fully because they had survived pain, so no longer feared it?

I think the writer’s job is to paint the gray because no life is clearly defined.

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that’s going towards the book.

I got a degree in sociology, didn’t read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the poor man, and I was very romantic and passionate about it.

One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I’ve had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I’ve brought readers to my dad’s work. I can’t tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father’s work was masterful.

My own sense of the world is that very little is absolute or black and white or easily understood. I suppose in all my writing I’m trying to cast the reader into this spiritually ambivalent dream world, which hopefully mirrors more honestly the complex reality we find ourselves in.