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I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

Generally, I have a strong interest in trying to help people who are maybe not as lucky as I am. I've been well rewarded in this world. I'm more worried about the next one.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

Growing up, books were my lifeline, and I owe a debt to those writers that can never be repaid. They saved my sanity and gave me a world I could escape to. If I can pay that forward to another person, that's all I ask.

I feel like the writers that I'm drawn to, the writers that I really cling to, are the writers who seem to be writing out of a desperate act. It's like their writing is part of a survival kit. Those are the writers that I just absolutely cherish and carry with me everywhere I go.

I have failed a lot in my philanthropy, where I will make philanthropic contributions and they just won't be effective.

If there is one thing I hope my books do always and forever, it's that they honor working people.

I'm a very spoiled writer. I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I'm inefficient.

I've always been a little bit cautious about what projects I step into. I don't mean to be dramatic, but I feel that every single thing you do in life, you give a piece of your soul, and I want to be responsible with that.