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Human nature is weak.

Human nature is not nearly as bad as it has been thought to be.

Books are humanity in print.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature. I feel very lucky that as a writer I get to learn so much about it just to do my job right.

Sometimes, I can myself be frustrated by books that seem to me to be insufficiently realistic about the world's potential for just being totally a randomly bad place.

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit.

I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.

I think, to give our bookshelf a little credit, our area of the library and the bookstore has attracted stronger writers as it's started to thrive.

Humans are very complex; I definitely have a new respect for authors that are able to write books nonstop. It's an incredible talent.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods.